Computational Imaging and Vision

Reinhard Klette · Isaac Amidror · Luc Florack · Bart M. Haar Romeny

Latest release: February 6, 2017

Series

42

Books

Geometry-Driven Diffusion in Computer Vision

Book 1·Mar 2013

Scale is a concept the antiquity of which can hardly be traced. Certainly the familiar phenomena that accompany sc ale changes in optical patterns are mentioned in the earliest written records. The most obvious topological changes such as the creation or annihilation of details have been a topic to philosophers, artists and later scientists. This appears to of fascination be the case for all cultures from which extensive written records exist. For th instance, chinese 17 c artist manuals remark that "distant faces have no eyes" . The merging of details is also obvious to many authors, e. g. , Lucretius mentions the fact that distant islands look like a single one. The one topo logical event that is (to the best of my knowledge) mentioned only late (by th John Ruskin in his "Elements of drawing" of the mid 19 c) is the splitting of a blob on blurring. The change of images on a gradual increase of resolu tion has been a recurring theme in the arts (e. g. , the poetic description of the distant armada in Calderon's The Constant Prince) and this "mystery" (as Ruskin calls it) is constantly exploited by painters.

Mathematical Morphology and Its Applications to Image Processing

Book 2·Dec 2012

Mathematical morphology (MM) is a theory for the analysis of spatial structures. It is called morphology since it aims at analysing the shape and form of objects, and it is mathematical in the sense that the analysis is based on set theory, topology, lattice algebra, random functions, etc.
MM is not only a theory, but also a powerful image analysis technique. The purpose of the present book is to provide the image analysis community with a snapshot of current theoretical and applied developments of MM. The book consists of forty-five contributions classified by subject. It demonstrates a wide range of topics suited to the morphological approach.

Three-Dimensional Image Reconstruction in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine

Book 4·Mar 2013

This book contains a selection of communications presented at the Third International Meeting on Fully Three-Dimensional Image Reconstruction in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, held 4-6 July 1995 at Domaine d' Aix-Marlioz, Aix-Ies-Bains, France. This nice resort provided an inspiring environment to hold discussions and presentations on new and developing issues. Roentgen discovered X-ray radiation in 1895 and Becquerel found natural radioactivity in 1896 : a hundred years later, this conference was focused on the applications of such radiations to explore the human body. If the physics is now fully understood, 3D imaging techniques based on ionising radiations are still progressing. These techniques include 3D Radiology, 3D X-ray Computed Tomography (3D-CT), Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Radiology is dedicated to morphological imaging, using transmitted radiations from an external X-ray source, and nuclear medicine to functional imaging, using radiations emitted from an internal radioactive tracer. In both cases, new 3D tomographic systems will tend to use 2D detectors in order to improve the radiation detection efficiency. Taking a set of 2D acquisitions around the patient, 3D acquisitions are obtained. Then, fully 3D image reconstruction algorithms are required to recover the 3D image of the body from these projection measurements.

Mathematical Morphology and Its Applications to Image and Signal Processing

Book 5·Dec 2012

Mathematical morphology (MM) is a powerful methodology for the quantitative analysis of geometrical structures. It consists of a broad and coherent collection of theoretical concepts, nonlinear signal operators, and algorithms aiming at extracting, from images or other geometrical objects, information related to their shape and size. Its mathematical origins stem from set theory, lattice algebra, and integral and stochastic geometry.
MM was initiated in the late 1960s by G. Matheron and J. Serra at the Fontainebleau School of Mines in France. Originally it was applied to analyzing images from geological or biological specimens. However, its rich theoretical framework, algorithmic efficiency, easy implementability on special hardware, and suitability for many shape- oriented problems have propelled its widespread diffusion and adoption by many academic and industry groups in many countries as one among the dominant image analysis methodologies.
The purpose of Mathematical Morphology and its Applications to Image and Signal Processing is to provide the image analysis community with a sampling from the current developments in the theoretical (deterministic and stochastic) and computational aspects of MM and its applications to image and signal processing. The book consists of the papers presented at the ISMM'96 grouped into the following themes:

Theory
Connectivity
Filtering
Nonlinear System Related to Morphology
Algorithms/Architectures
Granulometries, Texture
Segmentation
Image Sequence Analysis
Learning
Document Analysis
Applications

Epipolar Geometry in Stereo, Motion and Object Recognition: A Unified Approach

Book 6·Mar 2013

Appendix 164 3. A 3. A. 1 Approximate Estimation of Fundamental Matrix from General Matrix 164 3. A. 2 Estimation of Affine Transformation 165 4 RECOVERY OF EPIPOLAR GEOMETRY FROM LINE SEGMENTS OR LINES 167 Line Segments or Straight Lines 168 4. 1 4. 2 Solving Motion Using Line Segments Between Two Views 173 4. 2. 1 Overlap of Two Corresponding Line Segments 173 Estimating Motion by Maximizing Overlap 175 4. 2. 2 Implementation Details 4. 2. 3 176 Reconstructing 3D Line Segments 4. 2. 4 179 4. 2. 5 Experimental Results 180 4. 2. 6 Discussions 192 4. 3 Determining Epipolar Geometry of Three Views 194 4. 3. 1 Trifocal Constraints for Point Matches 194 4. 3. 2 Trifocal Constraints for Line Correspondences 199 4. 3. 3 Linear Estimation of K, L, and M Using Points and Lines 200 4. 3. 4 Determining Camera Projection Matrices 201 4. 3. 5 Image Transfer 203 4. 4 Summary 204 5 REDEFINING STEREO, MOTION AND OBJECT RECOGNITION VIA EPIPOLAR GEOMETRY 205 5. 1 Conventional Approaches to Stereo, Motion and Object Recognition 205 5. 1. 1 Stereo 205 5. 1. 2 Motion 206 5. 1. 3 Object Recognition 207 5. 2 Correspondence in Stereo, Motion and Object Recognition as 1D Search 209 5. 2. 1 Stereo Matching 209 xi Contents 5. 2. 2 Motion Correspondence and Segmentation 209 5. 2. 3 3D Object Recognition and Localization 210 Disparity and Spatial Disparity Space 210 5.

Ridges in Image and Data Analysis

Book 7·Dec 2012

The concept of ridges has appeared numerous times in the image processing liter ature. Sometimes the term is used in an intuitive sense. Other times a concrete definition is provided. In almost all cases the concept is used for very specific ap plications. When analyzing images or data sets, it is very natural for a scientist to measure critical behavior by considering maxima or minima of the data. These critical points are relatively easy to compute. Numerical packages always provide support for root finding or optimization, whether it be through bisection, Newton's method, conjugate gradient method, or other standard methods. It has not been natural for scientists to consider critical behavior in a higher-order sense. The con cept of ridge as a manifold of critical points is a natural extension of the concept of local maximum as an isolated critical point. However, almost no attention has been given to formalizing the concept. There is a need for a formal development. There is a need for understanding the computation issues that arise in the imple mentations. The purpose of this book is to address both needs by providing a formal mathematical foundation and a computational framework for ridges. The intended audience for this book includes anyone interested in exploring the use fulness of ridges in data analysis.

Gaussian Scale-Space Theory

Book 8·Apr 2013

Gaussian scale-space is one of the best understood multi-resolution techniques available to the computer vision and image analysis community. It is the purpose of this book to guide the reader through some of its main aspects. During an intensive weekend in May 1996 a workshop on Gaussian scale-space theory was held in Copenhagen, which was attended by many of the leading experts in the field. The bulk of this book originates from this workshop. Presently there exist only two books on the subject. In contrast to Lindeberg's monograph (Lindeberg, 1994e) this book collects contributions from several scale space researchers, whereas it complements the book edited by ter Haar Romeny (Haar Romeny, 1994) on non-linear techniques by focusing on linear diffusion. This book is divided into four parts. The reader not so familiar with scale-space will find it instructive to first consider some potential applications described in Part 1. Parts II and III both address fundamental aspects of scale-space. Whereas scale is treated as an essentially arbitrary constant in the former, the latter em phasizes the deep structure, i.e. the structure that is revealed by varying scale. Finally, Part IV is devoted to non-linear extensions, notably non-linear diffusion techniques and morphological scale-spaces, and their relation to the linear case. The Danish National Science Research Council is gratefully acknowledged for providing financial support for the workshop under grant no. 9502164.

Motion-Based Recognition

Book 9·Mar 2013

Motion-based recognition deals with the recognition of an object and/or its motion, based on motion in a series of images. In this approach, a sequence containing a large number of frames is used to extract motion information. The advantage is that a longer sequence leads to recognition of higher level motions, like walking or running, which consist of a complex and coordinated series of events. Unlike much previous research in motion, this approach does not require explicit reconstruction of shape from the images prior to recognition.
This book provides the state-of-the-art in this rapidly developing discipline. It consists of a collection of invited chapters by leading researchers in the world covering various aspects of motion-based recognition including lipreading, gesture recognition, facial expression recognition, gait analysis, cyclic motion detection, and activity recognition.
Audience: This volume will be of interest to researchers and post- graduate students whose work involves computer vision, robotics and image processing.

Image Structure

Book 10·Apr 2013

Despite the fact that images constitute the main objects in computer vision and image analysis, there is remarkably little concern about their actual definition. In this book a complete account of image structure is proposed in terms of rigorously defined machine concepts, using basic tools from algebra, analysis, and differential geometry. Machine technicalities such as discretisation and quantisation details are de-emphasised, and robustness with respect to noise is manifest.
From the foreword by Jan Koenderink:
`It is my hope that the book will find a wide audience, including physicists - who still are largely unaware of the general importance and power of scale space theory, mathematicians - who will find in it a principled and formally tight exposition of a topic awaiting further development, and computer scientists - who will find here a unified and conceptually well founded framework for many apparently unrelated and largely historically motivated methods they already know and love. The book is suited for self-study and graduate courses, the carefully formulated exercises are designed to get to grips with the subject matter and prepare the reader for original research.'

Discrete Representation of Spatial Objects in Computer Vision

Book 11·Apr 2013

One of the most natural representations for modelling spatial objects in computers is discrete representations in the form of a 2D square raster and a 3D cubic grid, since these are naturally obtained by segmenting sensor images. However, the main difficulty is that discrete representations are only approximations of the original objects, and can only be as accurate as the cell size allows. If digitisation is done by real sensor devices, then there is the additional difficulty of sensor distortion. To overcome this, digital shape features must be used that abstract from the inaccuracies of digital representation. In order to ensure the correspondence of continuous and digital features, it is necessary to relate shape features of the underlying continuous objects and to determine the necessary resolution of the digital representation.
This volume gives an overview and a classification of the actual approaches to describe the relation between continuous and discrete shape features that are based on digital geometric concepts of discrete structures.
Audience: This book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students whose work involves computer vision, image processing, knowledge representation or representation of spatial objects.

Digital Mammography: Nijmegen, 1998

Book 13·Dec 2012

In June 1998 the Fourth International Workshop on Digital Mammography was held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where it was hosted by the department of Radiology of the University Hospital Nijmegen. This series of meetings was initiated at the 1993 SPIE Biomedical Image Processing Conference in San Jose, USA, where a number of sessions were entirely devoted to mammographic image analysis. At very successful subsequent workshops held in York, UK (1994) and Chicago, USA (1996), the scope of the conference was broadened, establishing a platform for presentation and discussion of new developments in digital mammog raphy. Topics that are addressed at these meetings are computer-aided diagnosis, image processing, detector development, system design, observer performance and clinical evaluation. The goal is to bring researchers from universities, breast cancer experts, and engineers together, to exchange information and present new scientific developments in this rapidly evolving field. This book contains all the scientific papers and posters presented at the work shop in Nijmegen. Contributions came from as many as 20 different countries and 190 participants attended the meeting. At a technical exhibit companies demon strated new products and work in progress. Abstracts of all papers were reviewed by members of the scientific committee. Many of the accepted papers had excellent quality, but due to limited space not all of them could be included as full papers in these proceedings. Papers that were rated high by the reviewers are included as long or short papers, others appear as extended abstracts in the last chapter.

Mammographic Image Analysis

Book 14·Dec 2012

Breast cancer is a major health problem in the Western world, where it is the most common cancer among women. Approximately 1 in 12 women will develop breast cancer during the course of their lives. Over the past twenty years there have been a series of major advances in the manage ment of women with breast cancer, ranging from novel chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments to conservative surgery. The next twenty years are likely to see computerized image analysis playing an increasingly important role in patient management. As applications of image analysis go, medical applications are tough in general, and breast cancer image analysis is one of the toughest. There are many reasons for this: highly variable and irregular shapes of the objects of interest, changing imaging conditions, and the densely textured nature of the images. Add to this the increasing need for quantitative informa tion, precision, and reliability (very few false positives), and the image pro cessing challenge becomes quite daunting, in fact it pushes image analysis techniques right to their limits.

The Theory of the Moiré Phenomenon

Book 15·Dec 2012

Who has not noticed, on one o~casion or another, those intriguing geometric patterns which appear at the intersection Of repetitive structures such as two far picket fences on a hill, the railings on both sides of a bridge, superposed layers of fabric, or folds of a nylon curtain? This fascinating phenomenon, known as the moire effect, has found useful applications in several fields of science and technology, such as metrology, strain analysis or even document authentication and anti-counterfeiting. However, in other situations moire patterns may have an unwanted, adverse effect. This is the case in the printing world, and, in particular, in the field of colour reproduction: moire patterns which may be caused by the dot-screens used for colour printing may severely deteriorate the image quality and tum into a real printer's nightmare. The starting point of the work on which this book is based was, indeed, in the research of moire phenomena in the context of the colour printing process. The initial aim of this research was to understand the nature and the causes of the superposition moire patterns between regular screens in order to find how to avoid, or at least minimize, their adverse effect on colour printing. This interesting research led us, after all, to a much more far reaching mathematical understanding of the moire phenomenon, whose interest stands in its own right, independently of any particular application.

Image Textures and Gibbs Random Fields

Book 16·Dec 2012

Image analysis is one of the most challenging areas in today's computer sci ence, and image technologies are used in a host of applications. This book concentrates on image textures and presents novel techniques for their sim ulation, retrieval, and segmentation using specific Gibbs random fields with multiple pairwise interaction between signals as probabilistic image models. These models and techniques were developed mainly during the previous five years (in relation to April 1999 when these words were written). While scanning these pages you may notice that, in spite of long equa tions, the mathematical background is extremely simple. I have tried to avoid complex abstract constructions and give explicit physical (to be spe cific, "image-based") explanations to all the mathematical notions involved. Therefore it is hoped that the book can be easily read both by professionals and graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering who take an interest in image analysis and synthesis. Perhaps, mathematicians studying applications of random fields may find here some less traditional, and thus controversial, views and techniques.

Performance Characterization in Computer Vision

Book 17·Apr 2013

This edited volume addresses a subject which has been discussed inten sively in the computer vision community for several years. Performance characterization and evaluation of computer vision algorithms are of key importance, particularly with respect to the configuration of reliable and ro bust computer vision systems as well as the dissemination of reconfigurable systems in novel application domains. Although a plethora of literature on this subject is available for certain' areas of computer vision, the re search community still faces a lack of a well-grounded, generally accepted, and--eventually-standardized methods. The range of fundamental problems encoIl!passes the value of synthetic images in experimental computer vision, the selection of a representative set of real images related to specific domains and tasks, the definition of ground truth given different tasks and applications, the design of experimental test beds, the analysis of algorithms with respect to general characteristics such as complexity, resource consumption, convergence, stability, or range of admissible input data, the definition and analysis of performance measures for classes of algorithms, the role of statistics-based performance measures, the generation of data sheets with performance measures of algorithms sup porting the system engineer in his configuration problem, and the validity of model assumptions for specific applications of computer vision.

Mathematical Morphology and Its Applications to Image and Signal Processing

Book 18·Apr 2006

Mathematical morphology is a powerful methodology for the processing and analysis of geometric structure in signals and images. This book contains the proceedings of the fifth International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology and its Applications to Image and Signal Processing, held June 26-28, 2000, at Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, California. It provides a broad sampling of the most recent theoretical and practical developments of mathematical morphology and its applications to image and signal processing. Areas covered include: decomposition of structuring functions and morphological operators, morphological discretization, filtering, connectivity and connected operators, morphological shape analysis and interpolation, texture analysis, morphological segmentation, morphological multiresolution techniques and scale-spaces, and morphological algorithms and applications.
Audience: The subject matter of this volume will be of interest to electrical engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians whose research work is focused on the theoretical and practical aspects of nonlinear signal and image processing. It will also be of interest to those working in computer vision, applied mathematics, and computer graphics.

Wavelets in Signal and Image Analysis: From Theory to Practice

Book 19·Mar 2013

Despite their novelty, wavelets have a tremendous impact on a number of modern scientific disciplines, particularly on signal and image analysis. Because of their powerful underlying mathematical theory, they offer exciting opportunities for the design of new multi-resolution processing algorithms and effective pattern recognition systems.
This book provides a much-needed overview of current trends in the practical application of wavelet theory. It combines cutting edge research in the rapidly developing wavelet theory with ideas from practical signal and image analysis fields. Subjects dealt with include balanced discussions on wavelet theory and its specific application in diverse fields, ranging from data compression to seismic equipment. In addition, the book offers insights into recent advances in emerging topics such as double density DWT, multiscale Bayesian estimation, symmetry and locality in image representation, and image fusion.
Audience: This volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers whose work involves acoustics, speech, signal and image processing, approximations and expansions, Fourier analysis, and medical imaging.

Segmentation and Recovery of Superquadrics

Book 20·Apr 2013

A representation of objects by their parts is the dominant strategy for representing complex 3D objects in many disciplines. In computer vision and robotics, superquadrics are among the most widespread part models. Superquadrics are a family of parametric models that cover a wide variety of smoothly changing 3D symmetric shapes, which are controlled with a small number of parameters and which can be augmented with the addition of global and local deformations. The book covers, in depth, the geometric properties of superquadrics. The main contribution of the book is an original approach to the recovery and segmentation of superquadrics from range images. Several applications of superquadrics in computer vision and robotics are thoroughly discussed and, in particular, the use of superquadrics for range image registration is demonstrated.
Audience: The book is intended for readers of all levels who are familiar with and interested in computer vision issues.

Landmark-Based Image Analysis: Using Geometric and Intensity Models

Book 21·Mar 2013

Landmarks are preferred image features for a variety of computer vision tasks such as image mensuration, registration, camera calibration, motion analysis, 3D scene reconstruction, and object recognition. Main advantages of using landmarks are robustness w. r. t. lightning conditions and other radiometric vari ations as well as the ability to cope with large displacements in registration or motion analysis tasks. Also, landmark-based approaches are in general com putationally efficient, particularly when using point landmarks. Note, that the term landmark comprises both artificial and natural landmarks. Examples are comers or other characteristic points in video images, ground control points in aerial images, anatomical landmarks in medical images, prominent facial points used for biometric verification, markers at human joints used for motion capture in virtual reality applications, or in- and outdoor landmarks used for autonomous navigation of robots. This book covers the extraction oflandmarks from images as well as the use of these features for elastic image registration. Our emphasis is onmodel-based approaches, i. e. on the use of explicitly represented knowledge in image analy sis. We principally distinguish between geometric models describing the shape of objects (typically their contours) and intensity models, which directly repre sent the image intensities, i. e. ,the appearance of objects. Based on these classes of models we develop algorithms and methods for analyzing multimodality im ages such as traditional 20 video images or 3D medical tomographic images.

State-of-the-Art in Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval

Book 22·Apr 2013

Images and video play a crucial role in visual information systems and multimedia. There is an extraordinary number of applications of such systems in entertainment, business, art, engineering, and science. Such applications often involved large image and video collections, and therefore, searching for images and video in large collections is becoming an important operation. Because of the size of such databases, efficiency is crucial. We strongly believe that image and video retrieval need an integrated approach from fields such as image processing, shape processing, perception, database indexing, visualization, and querying, etc.
This book contains a selection of results that was presented at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval, in December 1999. The purpose of this seminar was to bring together people from the various fields, in order to promote information exchange and interaction among researchers who are interested in various aspects of accessing the content of image and video data. The book provides an overview of the state of the art in content-based image and video retrieval. The topics covered by the chapters are integrated system aspects, as well as techniques from image processing, computer vision, multimedia, databases, graphics, signal processing, and information theory.
The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in the fields of multimedia, visual information (database) systems, computer vision, and information retrieval.