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Mass abnormality segmentation is a vital step for the medical diagnostic process and is attracting more and more the interest of many research groups. Currently, most of the works achieved in this area have used the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) as texture features with a region-based approach. These features come in previous phase for segmentation stage or are using as inputs to classification stage. The work discussed in this paper attempts to experiment the GLCM method under a contour-based approach. Besides, we experiment the proposed approach on various tissues densities to bring more significant results. At this end, we explored some challenging breast images from BIRADS medical Data Base. Our first experimentations showed promising results with regard to the edges mass segmentation methods. This paper discusses first the main works achieved in this area. Sections 2 and 3 present materials and our methodology. The main results are showed and evaluated before concluding our paper., Comment: 07 pages, 11 figures, 1 tableau, 07 equations, 34 references. appears in IJCSI International Journal of Computer Science Issues november 2013

Nonlocal filters are simple and powerful techniques for image denoising. In this paper we study the reformulation of a broad class of nonlocal filters in terms of two functional rearrangements: the decreasing and the relative rearrangements. Independently of the dimension of the image, we reformulate these filters as integral operators defined in a one-dimensional space corresponding to the level sets measures. We prove the equivalency between the original and the rearranged versions of the filters and propose a discretization in terms of constant-wise interpolators, which we prove to be convergent to the solution of the continuous setting. For some particular cases, this new formulation allows us to perform a detailed analysis of the filtering properties. Among others, we prove that the filtered image is a contrast change of the original image, and that the filtering procedure behaves asymptotically as a shock filter combined with a border diffusive term, responsible for the staircaising effect and the loss of contrast.

This paper presents a new color image enhancement technique based on modified MultiScale Retinex(MSR) algorithm and visual quality of the enhanced images are evaluated using a new metric, namely, wavelet energy. The color image enhancement is achieved by down sampling the value component of HSV color space converted image into three scales (normal, medium and fine) following the contrast stretching operation. These down sampled value components are enhanced using the MSR algorithm. The value component is reconstructed by averaging each pixels of the lower scale image with that of the upper scale image subsequent to up sampling the lower scale image. This process replaces dark pixel by the average pixels of both the lower scale and upper scale, while retaining the bright pixels. The quality of the reconstructed images in the proposed method is found to be good and far better then the other researchers method. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using new wavelet domain based assessment criterion, referred as wavelet energy. This scheme computes the energy of both original and enhanced image in wavelet domain. The number of edge details as well as wavelet energy is less in a poor quality image compared with naturally enhanced image. Experimental results presented confirms that the proposed wavelet energy based color image quality assessment technique efficiently characterizes both the local and global details of enhanced image., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, Recent Advances in Intelligent Informatics Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing Volume 235, 2014, pp 83-92

In this paper, a reliable method for detecting human faces in color images is proposed. This system firstly detects skin color in YCgCr and YIQ color space, then filters binary texture and the result is morphological processed, finally converts skin tone to the preferred skin color configured by users in YIQ color space. The real-time adjusting circuit is implemented and some of simulation results are given out. Experimental results demonstrate that the method has achieved high rates and low false positives, another advantage is its simplicity and minor computational costs., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

Thresholding is an important task in image processing. It is a main tool in pattern recognition, image segmentation, edge detection and scene analysis. In this paper, we present a new thresholding technique based on two-dimensional Tsallis entropy. The two-dimensional Tsallis entropy was obtained from the twodimensional histogram which was determined by using the gray value of the pixels and the local average gray value of the pixels, the work it was applied a generalized entropy formalism that represents a recent development in statistical mechanics. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by using examples from the real-world and synthetic images. The performance evaluation of the proposed technique in terms of the quality of the thresholded images are presented. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieve better result than the Shannon method.

Nonlocal filters are simple and powerful techniques for image denoising. In this paper, we give new insights into the analysis of one kind of them, the Neighborhood filter, by using a classical although not very common transformation: the decreasing rearrangement of a function (the image). Independently of the dimension of the image, we reformulate the Neighborhood filter and its iterative variants as an integral operator defined in a one-dimensional space. The simplicity of this formulation allows to perform a detailed analysis of its properties. Among others, we prove that the filter behaves asymptotically as a shock filter combined with a border diffusive term, responsible for the staircaising effect and the loss of contrast.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are widely used in target recognition tasks nowadays. In this letter, we propose an automatic approach for radar shadow detection and extraction from SAR images utilizing geometric projections along with the digital elevation model (DEM) which corresponds to the given geo-referenced SAR image. First, the DEM is rotated into the radar geometry so that each row would match that of a radar line of sight. Next, we extract the shadow regions by processing row by row until the image is covered fully. We test the proposed shadow detection approach on different DEMs and a simulated 1D signals and 2D hills and volleys modeled by various variance based Gaussian functions. Experimental results indicate the proposed algorithm produces good results in detecting shadows in SAR images with high resolution., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

Multiphase active contour based models are useful in identifying multiple regions with different characteristics such as the mean values of regions. This is relevant in brain magnetic resonance images (MRIs), allowing the differentiation of white matter against gray matter. We consider a well defined globally convex formulation of Vese and Chan multiphase active contour model for segmenting brain MRI images. A well-established theory and an efficient dual minimization scheme are thoroughly described which guarantees optimal solutions and provides stable segmentations. Moreover, under the dual minimization implementation our model perfectly describes disjoint regions by avoiding local minima solutions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach provides better accuracy than other related multiphase active contour algorithms even under severe noise, intensity inhomogeneities, and partial volume effects.

Owing to the edge preserving ability and low computational cost of the total variation (TV), variational models with the TV regularization have been widely investigated in the field of multiplicative noise removal. The key points of the successful application of these models lie in: the optimal selection of the regularization parameter which balances the data-fidelity term with the TV regularizer; the efficient algorithm to compute the solution. In this paper, we propose two fast algorithms based on the linearized technique, which are able to estimate the regularization parameter and recover the image simultaneously. In the iteration step of the proposed algorithms, the regularization parameter is adjusted by a special discrepancy function defined for multiplicative noise. The convergence properties of the proposed algorithms are proved under certain conditions, and numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithms overall outperform some state-of-the-art methods in the PSNR values and computational time., Comment: 23pages

In this letter we propose to denoise digital color images via an improved geometric diffusion scheme. By introducing edges detected from all three color channels into the diffusion the proposed scheme avoids color smearing artifacts. Vector valued diffusion is used to control the smoothing and the geometry of color images are taken into consideration. Color edge strength function computed from different planes is introduced and it stops the diffusion spread across chromatic edges. Experimental results indicate that the scheme achieves good denoising with edge preservation when compared to other related schemes., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 4 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Some mistakes were corrected from previous version

This paper proposes an efficient three fold stratified SIFT matching for iris recognition. The objective is to filter wrongly paired conventional SIFT matches. In Strata I, the keypoints from gallery and probe iris images are paired using traditional SIFT approach. Due to high image similarity at different regions of iris there may be some impairments. These are detected and filtered by finding gradient of paired keypoints in Strata II. Further, the scaling factor of paired keypoints is used to remove impairments in Strata III. The pairs retained after Strata III are likely to be potential matches for iris recognition. The proposed system performs with an accuracy of 96.08% and 97.15% on publicly available CASIAV3 and BATH databases respectively. This marks significant improvement of accuracy and FAR over the existing SIFT matching for iris., Comment: 7 pages

Secret communication techniques are of great demand since last 3000 years due to the need of information security and confidentiality at various levels of communication such as while communicating confidential personal data, medical data of patients, defence and intelligence information of countries, data related to examinations etc. With advancements in image processing research, Image encryption and Steganographic techniques have gained popularity over other forms of hidden communication techniques during the last few decades and a number of image encryption models are suggested by various researchers from time to time. In this paper, we are suggesting a new image encryption model based on Fibonacci and Lucas series., Comment: International Journal on Cryptography and Information Security (IJCIS),Vol.2, No.3, September 2012, Pp. 131- 141 (11 Pages), 6 figures. http://airccse.org/journal/ijcis/current2012.html

The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has recently sparked interest as a flexible and efficient optimization tool for imaging inverse problems, namely deconvolution and reconstruction under non-smooth convex regularization. ADMM achieves state-of-the-art speed by adopting a divide and conquer strategy, wherein a hard problem is split into simpler, efficiently solvable sub-problems (e.g., using fast Fourier or wavelet transforms, or simple proximity operators). In deconvolution, one of these sub-problems involves a matrix inversion (i.e., solving a linear system), which can be done efficiently (in the discrete Fourier domain) if the observation operator is circulant, i.e., under periodic boundary conditions. This paper extends ADMM-based image deconvolution to the more realistic scenario of unknown boundary, where the observation operator is modeled as the composition of a convolution (with arbitrary boundary conditions) with a spatial mask that keeps only pixels that do not depend on the unknown boundary. The proposed approach also handles, at no extra cost, problems that combine the recovery of missing pixels (i.e., inpainting) with deconvolution. We show that the resulting algorithms inherit the convergence guarantees of ADMM and illustrate its performance on non-periodic deblurring (with and without inpainting of interior pixels) under total-variation and frame-based regularization., Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing in August 2012

In JPEG (DCT based) compresses image data by representing the original image with a small number of transform coefficients. It exploits the fact that for typical images a large amount of signal energy is concentrated in a small number of coefficients. The goal of DCT transform coding is to minimize the number of retained transform coefficients while keeping distortion at an acceptable level.In JPEG, it is done in 8X8 non overlapping blocks. It divides an image into blocks of equal size and processes each block independently. Block processing allows the coder to adapt to the local image statistics, exploit the correlation present among neighboring image pixels, and to reduce computational and storage requirements. One of the most degradation of the block transform coding is the blocking artifact. These artifacts appear as a regular pattern of visible block boundaries. This degradation is a direct result of the coarse quantization of the coefficients and the independent processing of the blocks which does not take into account the existing correlations among adjacent block pixels. In this paper attempt is being made to reduce the blocking artifact introduced by the Block DCT Transform in JPEG., Comment: 10 Pages including 6 figures, Presented in the TECHNOVISION-10 in G.N.D.E.C., Ludhiana, Punjab, India

This paper analyses the set of iris codes stored or used in an iris recognition system as an f-granular space. The f-granulation is given by identifying in the iris code space the extensions of the fuzzy concepts wolves, goats, lambs and sheep (previously introduced by Doddington as 'animals' of the biometric menagerie) - which together form a partitioning of the iris code space. The main question here is how objective (stable / stationary) this partitioning is when the iris segments are subject to noisy acquisition. In order to prove that the f-granulation of iris code space with respect to the fuzzy concepts that define the biometric menagerie is unstable in noisy conditions (is sensitive to noise), three types of noise (localvar, motion blur, salt and pepper) have been alternatively added to the iris segments extracted from University of Bath Iris Image Database. The results of 180 exhaustive (all-to-all) iris recognition tests are presented and commented here., Comment: 5th Int. Conf. on Soft Computing and Applications (Szeged, HU), 22-24 Aug 2012

This paper proves that in iris recognition, the concepts of sheep, goats, lambs and wolves - as proposed by Doddington and Yager in the so-called Biometric Menagerie, are at most fuzzy and at least not quite well defined. They depend not only on the users or on their biometric templates, but also on the parameters that calibrate the iris recognition system. This paper shows that, in the case of iris recognition, the extensions of these concepts have very unsharp and unstable (non-stationary) boundaries. The membership of a user to these categories is more often expressed as a degree (as a fuzzy value) rather than as a crisp value. Moreover, they are defined by fuzzy Sugeno rules instead of classical (crisp) definitions. For these reasons, we said that the Biometric Menagerie proposed by Doddington and Yager could be at most a fuzzy concept of biometry, but even this status is conditioned by improving its definition. All of these facts are confirmed experimentally in a series of 12 exhaustive iris recognition tests undertaken for University of Bath Iris Image Database while using three different iris code dimensions (256x16, 128x8 and 64x4), two different iris texture encoders (Log-Gabor and Haar-Hilbert) and two different types of safety models., Comment: 5th Int. Conf. on Soft Computing and Applications (Szeged, HU), 22-24 Aug 2012

This paper proposes an efficient probabilistic method that computes combinatorial gradient fields for two dimensional image data. In contrast to existing algorithms, this approach yields a geometric Morse-Smale complex that converges almost surely to its continuous counterpart when the image resolution is increased. This approach is motivated using basic ideas from probability theory and builds upon an algorithm from discrete Morse theory with a strong mathematical foundation. While a formal proof is only hinted at, we do provide a thorough numerical evaluation of our method and compare it to established algorithms., Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures

The Block Transform Coded, JPEG- a lossy image compression format has been used to keep storage and bandwidth requirements of digital image at practical levels. However, JPEG compression schemes may exhibit unwanted image artifacts to appear - such as the 'blocky' artifact found in smooth/monotone areas of an image, caused by the coarse quantization of DCT coefficients. A number of image filtering approaches have been analyzed in literature incorporating value-averaging filters in order to smooth out the discontinuities that appear across DCT block boundaries. Although some of these approaches are able to decrease the severity of these unwanted artifacts to some extent, other approaches have certain limitations that cause excessive blurring to high-contrast edges in the image. The image deblocking algorithm presented in this paper aims to filter the blocked boundaries. This is accomplished by employing smoothening, detection of blocked edges and then filtering the difference between the pixels containing the blocked edge. The deblocking algorithm presented has been successful in reducing blocky artifacts in an image and therefore increases the subjective as well as objective quality of the reconstructed image., Comment: 18 pages with 19 Figures, To appear in the Proceedings of International Journal of Computer Graphics & Animation (IJCGA) Vol.2, No.2/3, July 2012, 17-35

Fast and robust hand segmentation and tracking is an essential basis for gesture recognition and thus an important component for contact-less human-computer interaction (HCI). Hand gesture recognition based on 2D video data has been intensively investigated. However, in practical scenarios purely intensity based approaches suffer from uncontrollable environmental conditions like cluttered background colors. In this paper we present a real-time hand segmentation and tracking algorithm using Time-of-Flight (ToF) range cameras and intensity data. The intensity and range information is fused into one pixel value, representing its combined intensity-depth homogeneity. The scene is hierarchically clustered using a GPU based parallel merging algorithm, allowing a robust identification of both hands even for inhomogeneous backgrounds. After the detection, both hands are tracked on the CPU. Our tracking algorithm can cope with the situation that one hand is temporarily covered by the other hand., Comment: Technical Report

The analysis of climate regions is very important for designers and architects, because the increase in density and built up spaces and reduction in open spaces and green lands induce the increase of heat, especially in an urban area, deteriorating the environment and causing health problems. This study analyzes the Land Surface Temperature (LST) differences in the region of Dobrogea, Romania, and compares with the land use and land cover types using TM and ETM+ data of 1989 and 2000. As the analysis is performed on large data sets, we used Grid Computing to implement a service for using on Computational Grids with a Web-based client interface, which will be greatly useful and convenient for those who are studying the ground thermal environment and heat island effects by using Landsat TM/ETM+ bands, and have typical workstations, with no special computing and storing resources for computationally intensive satellite image processing and no license for a commercial image processing tool. Based on the satellite imagery, the paper also addresses a Supervised Classification algorithm and the computation of two indices of great value in water resources management, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), respectively Land Surface Emissivity (LSE)., Comment: 16 pages; ISSN - [Online: 0974 - 9322 Print : 0975- 2293]

The efficient repair of cellular DNA is essential for the maintenance and inheritance of genomic information. In order to cope with the high frequency of spontaneous and induced DNA damage, a multitude of repair mechanisms have evolved. These are enabled by a wide range of protein factors specifically recognizing different types of lesions and finally restoring the normal DNA sequence. This work focuses on the repair factor XPC (xeroderma pigmentosum complementation group C), which identifies bulky DNA lesions and initiates their removal via the nucleotide excision repair pathway. The binding of XPC to damaged DNA can be visualized in living cells by following the accumulation of a fluorescent XPC fusion at lesions induced by laser microirradiation in a fluorescence microscope. In this work, an automated image processing pipeline is presented which allows to identify and quantify the accumulation reaction without any user interaction. The image processing pipeline comprises a preprocessing stage where the image stack data is filtered and the nucleus of interest is segmented. Afterwards, the images are registered to each other in order to account for movements of the cell, and then a bounding box enclosing the XPC-specific signal is automatically determined. Finally, the time-dependent relocation of XPC is evaluated by analyzing the intensity change within this box. Comparison of the automated processing results with the manual evaluation yields qualitatively similar results. However, the automated analysis provides more accurate, reproducible data with smaller standard errors. The image processing pipeline presented in this work allows for an efficient analysis of large amounts of experimental data with no user interaction required.

As a powerful statistical image modeling technique, sparse representation has been successfully used in various image restoration applications. The success of sparse representation owes to the development of l1-norm optimization techniques, and the fact that natural images are intrinsically sparse in some domain. The image restoration quality largely depends on whether the employed sparse domain can represent well the underlying image. Considering that the contents can vary significantly across different images or different patches in a single image, we propose to learn various sets of bases from a pre-collected dataset of example image patches, and then for a given patch to be processed, one set of bases are adaptively selected to characterize the local sparse domain. We further introduce two adaptive regularization terms into the sparse representation framework. First, a set of autoregressive (AR) models are learned from the dataset of example image patches. The best fitted AR models to a given patch are adaptively selected to regularize the image local structures. Second, the image non-local self-similarity is introduced as another regularization term. In addition, the sparsity regularization parameter is adaptively estimated for better image restoration performance. Extensive experiments on image deblurring and super-resolution validate that by using adaptive sparse domain selection and adaptive regularization, the proposed method achieves much better results than many state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both PSNR and visual perception., Comment: 35 pages. This paper is under review in IEEE TIP

We consider in this paper the information-theoretic secure key distribution problem over main and wire-tap noise channels with a public discussion in presence of an active adversary. In contrast to the solution proposed by ourselves for a similar problem using hashing for privacy amplification, in the current paper we use a technique of extractors. We propose modified key distribution protocols for which we prove explicit estimates of key rates without the use of estimates with uncertain coefficients in notations $O,\Omega,\Theta$. This leads in the new conclusion that the use of extractors is superior to the use of hash functions only with the very large key lengths $\ell$ (of order $\ell>10^5$ bits). We suggest hybrid key distribution protocols consisting from two consecutively executed stages. At the fist stage it is generated a short authentication key based on hash function, whereas at the second stage it is generated the final key with the use of extractors. We show that in fact the use of extraction procedure is effective only at the second stage. We get also some constructive estimates of the key rates for such protocols.

Recent studies in the field of human vision science suggest that the human responses to the stimuli on a visual display are non-deterministic. People may attend to different locations on the same visual input at the same time. Based on this knowledge, we propose a new stochastic model of visual attention by introducing a dynamic Bayesian network to predict the likelihood of where humans typically focus on a video scene. The proposed model is composed of a dynamic Bayesian network with 4 layers. Our model provides a framework that simulates and combines the visual saliency response and the cognitive state of a person to estimate the most probable attended regions. Sample-based inference with Markov chain Monte-Carlo based particle filter and stream processing with multi-core processors enable us to estimate human visual attention in near real time. Experimental results have demonstrated that our model performs significantly better in predicting human visual attention compared to the previous deterministic models., Comment: 24 pages, single-column, 13 figures excluding portlaits, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

Among the many ways to model signals, a recent approach that draws considerable attention is sparse representation modeling. In this model, the signal is assumed to be generated as a random linear combination of a few atoms from a pre-specified dictionary. In this work we analyze two Bayesian denoising algorithms -- the Maximum-Aposteriori Probability (MAP) and the Minimum-Mean-Squared-Error (MMSE) estimators, under the assumption that the dictionary is unitary. It is well known that both these estimators lead to a scalar shrinkage on the transformed coefficients, albeit with a different response curve. In this work we start by deriving closed-form expressions for these shrinkage curves and then analyze their performance. Upper bounds on the MAP and the MMSE estimation errors are derived. We tie these to the error obtained by a so-called oracle estimator, where the support is given, establishing a worst-case gain-factor between the MAP/MMSE estimation errors and the oracle's performance. These denoising algorithms are demonstrated on synthetic signals and on true data (images)., Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures

In this paper we show how certain techniques of image processing, having different scopes, can be joined together under a common "algebraic roof".