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Abstract: Image segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision and image analysis. Specially, the segmentation of medical images can assist doctors in making decisions. Due to the lack of distinctive features to describe the boundary of an organ and match function with high performance for features, medical image segmentation is difficult to be achieved with high accuracy. In this paper, an one-class classifier is proposed as the match function to decide whether the pixel belongs to the boundary or not. The proposed method is comprised of two steps. At first, a feature vector space is built with the gradient feature and its statistical information in the training stage. In the test image, a feature vector of one candidate probably being located on the boundary is reconstructed by sparse coding with the feature vector space. After reconstruction, the candidate is classified belonging to boundary or non-boundary via the reconstruction based one-class classifier. Then, in order to maintain the consistency between the candidates which are neighbors to each other, the neighboring candidates are coded using group lasso with the same dictionary. Compared to the traditional methods, the proposed one has three advantages. Firstly, it solves the non-Gaussian distribution problem of the positive samples. Secondly, it avoids large variation among the negative samples. Thirdly, the relationship of the neighboring candidates is considered and used in classification, which is ignored in other methods. The proposed method is validated on 52 MR images of prostate and outperforms Mahalanobis distance, which is considered as one of the state-of-the-art match functions. The experimental results show that the segmentation accuracy can be significantly improved by the proposed method with one-class classification. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The face almost always has an axis-symmetrical structure. However, as the face usually does not have an absolutely frontal pose when it is imaged, the majority of face images are not symmetrical images. These facts inspire us that the mirror image of the face image might be viewed as a representation of the face with a possible pose opposite to that of the original face image. In this paper we propose a scheme to produce the mirror image of the face and integrate the original face image and its mirror image for representation-based face recognition. This scheme is simple and computationally efficient. Almost all the representation-based classification methods can be improved by this scheme. The underlying rationales of the scheme are as follows: first, the use of the mirror image can somewhat overcome the misalignment problem of the face image in face recognition. Second, it is able to somewhat eliminate the side-effect of the variation of the pose and illumination of the original face image. The experiments show that the proposed scheme can greatly improve the accuracy of the representation-based classification methods. The proposed scheme might be also helpful for improving other face recognition methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Assessing aesthetic appeal of images is a highly subjective task which has attracted a lot of interests recently. It is an interdisciplinary subject related to art, psychology, and computer vision. In this paper, we systematically study prior researches of feature extraction in this area, and category them into four groups, low level, rule based, information theory, and visual attention. In each group, the effectiveness and limitations of existing features are examined. Based on the analysis, we propose a comprehensive feature set, which include 16 novel features and 70 well proved features. With this feature set, we build the system under machine learning scheme consisting of an SVM based classifier to estimate if an image is high aesthetic or low aesthetic . The experiments are conducted on public datasets show that our comprehensive feature set outperforms conventional models that concentrate mainly on certain types of features. The combination of our features produces a promising classification accuracy of 82.4% and a good performance comparable to aesthetic rating of human. Finally, we implemented the proposed evaluation system on mobile devices. It can provide real-time feedback to help users capture appealing photos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eye detection plays an important role in many practical applications. This paper presents a novel two-step scheme for eye detection. The first step models an eye by a newly defined visual-context pattern (VCP), and the second step applies semisupervised boosting for precise detection. VCP describes both the space and appearance relations between an eye region (region of eye) and a reference region (region of reference). The context feature of a VCP is extracted by using the integral image. Aiming to reduce the human labeling efforts, we apply semisupervised boosting, which integrates the context feature and the Haar-like features for precise eye detection. Experimental results on several standard face data sets demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective, robust, and efficient. We finally show that this approach is ready for practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]