Browsing by Subject "Hierarchical segmentation"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11

Open Access
Automatic detection of compound structures by joint selection of region groups from a hierarchical segmentation
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2016) Akçay, H. G.; Aksoy, S.
A challenging problem in remote sensing image analysis is the detection of heterogeneous compound structures such as different types of residential, industrial, and agricultural areas that are composed of spatial arrangements of simple primitive objects such as buildings and trees. We describe a generic method for the modeling and detection of compound structures that involve arrangements of an unknown number of primitives in large scenes. The modeling process starts with a single example structure, considers the primitive objects as random variables, builds a contextual model of their arrangements using a Markov random field, and learns the parameters of this model via sampling from the corresponding maximum entropy distribution. The detection task is formulated as the selection of multiple subsets of candidate regions from a hierarchical segmentation where each set of selected regions constitutes an instance of the example compound structure. The combinatorial selection problem is solved by the joint sampling of groups of regions by maximizing the likelihood of their individual appearances and relative spatial arrangements. Experiments using very high spatial resolution images show that the proposed method can effectively localize an unknown number of instances of different compound structures that cannot be detected by using spectral and shape features alone.
Open Access
Automatic detection of geospatial objects using multiple hierarchical segmentations
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2008-07) Akçay, H. G.; Aksoy, S.
The object-based analysis of remotely sensed imagery provides valuable spatial and structural information that is complementary to pixel-based spectral information in classification. In this paper, we present novel methods for automatic object detection in high-resolution images by combining spectral information with structural information exploited by using image segmentation. The proposed segmentation algorithm uses morphological operations applied to individual spectral bands using structuring elements in increasing sizes. These operations produce a set of connected components forming a hierarchy of segments for each band. A generic algorithm is designed to select meaningful segments that maximize a measure consisting of spectral homogeneity and neighborhood connectivity. Given the observation that different structures appear more clearly at different scales in different spectral bands, we describe a new algorithm for unsupervised grouping of candidate segments belonging to multiple hierarchical segmentations to find coherent sets of segments that correspond to actual objects. The segments are modeled by using their spectral and textural content, and the grouping problem is solved by using the probabilistic latent semantic analysis algorithm that builds object models by learning the object-conditional probability distributions. The automatic labeling of a segment is done by computing the similarity of its feature distribution to the distribution of the learned object models using the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The performances of the unsupervised segmentation and object detection algorithms are evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively using three different data sets with comparative experiments, and the results show that the proposed methods are able to automatically detect, group, and label segments belonging to the same object classes. © 2008 IEEE.
Open Access
Detection of compound structures using multiple hierarchical segmentations
(IEEE, 2014) Akçay, Hüseyin Gökhan; Aksoy, Selim
In this paper, we present a method for automatic compound structure detection in high-resolution images. Given a query compound structure, our aim is to detect coherent regions with similar spatial arrangement and characteristics in multiple hierarchical segmentations. A Markov random field is constructed by representing query regions as variables and connecting the vertices that are spatially close by edges. Then, a maximum entropy distribution is assumed over the query region process and selection of similar region processes among a set of region hierarchies is achieved by maximizing the query model. Experiments using WorldView-2 images show the efficiency of probabilistic modeling of compound structures. © 2014 IEEE.
Open Access
Detection of compound structures using multiple hierarchical segmentations
(IEEE, 2012) Akçay, H. Gökhan; Aksoy, Selim
In this paper, our aim is to discover compound structures comprised of regions obtained from hierarchical segmentations of multiple spectral bands. A region adjacency graph is constructed by representing regions as vertices and connecting these vertices that are spatially close by edges. Then, dissimilarities between neighboring vertices are computed using statistical and structural features, and are assigned as edge weights. Finally, the compound structures are detected by extracting the connected components of the graph whose edges with relatively large weights are removed. Experiments using WorldView-2 images show that grouping of these vertices according to different criteria can extract high-level compound structures that cannot be obtained using traditional techniques. © 2012 IEEE.
Open Access
Detection of heterogeneous structures using hierarchical segmentation
(IEEE, 2011) Akçay, H. Gokhan; Aksoy, Selim
We present an unsupervised hierarchical segmentation algorithm for detecting complex heterogeneous image structures that are comprised of simpler homogeneous primitive objects. The first step segments primitive objects with uniform spectral content. Then, the co-occurrence information between neighboring regions is modeled and clustered. We assume that dense clusters of this co-occurrence space can be considered significant. Finally, the neighboring regions within these clusters are merged to obtain the next level in the segmentation hierarchy. The experiments show that the algorithm that iteratively clusters and merges region groups is able to segment heterogeneous structures in a hierarchical manner. © 2011 IEEE.
Open Access
Hierarchical segmentation of complex structures
(IEEE, 2010) Akçay, H. Gökhan; Aksoy, Selim; Soille P.
We present an unsupervised hierarchical segmentation algorithm for detection of complex heterogeneous image structures that are comprised of simpler homogeneous primitive objects. An initial segmentation step produces regions corresponding to primitive objects with uniform spectral content. Next, the transitions between neighboring regions are modeled and clustered. We assume that the clusters that are dense and large enough in this transition space can be considered as significant. Then, the neighboring regions belonging to the significant clusters are merged to obtain the next level in the hierarchy. The experiments show that the algorithm that iteratively clusters and merges region groups is able to segment high-level complex structures in a hierarchical manner. © 2010 IEEE.
Open Access
Hierarchical segmentation, object detection and classification in remotely sensed images
(2007) Akçay, Hüseyin Gökhan
Automatic content extraction and classification of remotely sensed images have become highly desired goals by the advances in satellite technology and computing power. The usual choice for the level of processing image data has been pixelbased analysis. However, spatial information is an important element to interpret the land cover because pixels alone do not give much information about image content. Automatic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing imagery is an important problem in remote sensing applications because the resulting segmentations can provide valuable spatial and structural information that are complementary to pixel-based spectral information in classification. In this thesis, we first present a method that combines structural information extracted by morphological processing with spectral information summarized using principal components analysis to produce precise segmentations that are also robust to noise. First, principal components are computed from hyper-spectral data to obtain representative bands. Then, candidate regions are extracted by applying connected components analysis to the pixels selected according to their morphological profiles computed using opening and closing by reconstruction with increasing structuring element sizes. Next, these regions are represented using a tree, and the most meaningful ones are selected by optimizing a measure that consists of two factors: spectral homogeneity, which is calculated in terms of variances of spectral features, and neighborhood connectivity, which is calculated using sizes of connected components. Experiments on three data sets show that the method is able to detect structures in the image which are more precise and more meaningful than the structures detected by another approach that does not make strong use of neighborhood and spectral information.Then, we introduce an unsupervised method that combines both spectral and structural information for automatic object detection. First, a segmentation hierarchy is constructed and candidate segments for object detection are selected by the proposed segmentation method. Given the observation that different structures appear more clearly in different principal components, we present an algorithm that is based on probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) for grouping the candidate segments belonging to multiple segmentations and multiple principal components. The segments are modeled using their spectral content and the PLSA algorithm builds object models by learning the objectconditional probability distributions. Labeling of a segment is done by computing the similarity of its spectral distribution to the distribution of object models using Kullback-Leibler divergence. Experiments on three data sets show that our method is able to automatically detect, group, and label segments belonging to the same object classes. Finally, we present an approach for classification of remotely sensed imagery using spatial information extracted from multi-scale segmentations. Different structuring element size ranges are used to obtain multiple representations of an image at different scales to capture different details inherently found in different structures. Then, pixels at each scale are grouped into contiguous regions using the proposed segmentation method. The resulting regions are modeled using the statistical summaries of their spectral properties. These models are used to cluster the regions by the proposed grouping method, and the cluster memberships assigned to each region at multiple scales are used to classify the corresponding pixels into land cover/land use categories. Final classification is done using decision tree classifiers. Experiments with three ground truth data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach over traditional techniques that do not make strong use of region-based spatial information.
Open Access
Segmentation and classification of cervical cell images
(2010) Kale, Aslı
Cervical cancer can be prevented if it is detected and treated early. Pap smear test is a manual screening procedure used to detect cervical cancer and precancerous changes in an uterine cervix. However, this procedure is costly and it may result in inaccurate diagnoses due to human error like intra- and interobserver variability. Therefore, a computer-assisted screening system will be very bene cial to prevent cervical cancer if it increases the reliability of diagnoses. In this thesis, we propose a computer-assisted diagnosis system which helps cyto-technicians by sorting cells in a Pap smear slide according to their abnormality degree. There are three main components of such a system. Firstly, cells along with their nuclei are located using a segmentation procedure on an image taken using a microscope. Then, features describing these segmented cells are extracted. Finally, the cells are sorted according to their abnormality degree based on the extracted features. Di erent from the related studies that require images of a single cervical cell, we propose a non-parametric generic segmentation algorithm that can also handle images of overlapping cells. We use thresholding as the rst phase to extract background regions for obtaining remaining cell regions. The second phase consists of segmenting the cell regions by a non-parametric hierarchical segmentation algorithm that uses the spectral and shape information as well as the gradient information. The last phase aims to partition the cell region into true structures of each nucleus and the whole cytoplasm area by classifying the nal segments as nucleus or cytoplasm region. We evaluate our segmentation method both quantitatively and qualitatively using two data sets.By proposing an unsupervised screening system, we aim to approach the problem in a di erent way when compared to the related studies that concentrate on classi cation. In order to rank the cells in a Pap slide, we rst perform hierarchical clustering on 14 di erent cell features. The initial ordering of the cells is determined as the leaf ordering of the constructed hierarchical tree. Then, this initial ordering is improved by applying an optimal leaf ordering algorithm. The experiments with ground truth data show the e ectiveness of the proposed approach under di erent experimental settings.
Open Access
Segmentation of cervical cell images
(IEEE, 2010) Kale, A.; Aksoy, S.
The key step of a computer-assisted screening system that aims early diagnosis of cervical cancer is the accurate segmentation of cells. In this paper, we propose a two-phase approach to cell segmentation in Pap smear test images with the challenges of inconsistent staining, poor contrast, and overlapping cells. The first phase consists of segmenting an image by a non-parametric hierarchical segmentation algorithm that uses spectral and shape information as well as the gradient information. The second phase aims to obtain nucleus regions and cytoplasm areas by classifying the segments resulting from the first phase based on their spectral and shape features. Experiments using two data sets show that our method performs well for images containing both a single cell and many overlapping cells. © 2010 IEEE.
Open Access
Unsupervised segmentation and classification of cervical cell images
(Elsevier BV, 2012-12) Gençtav, A.; Aksoy, S.; Önder, S.
The Pap smear test is a manual screening procedure that is used to detect precancerous changes in cervical cells based on color and shape properties of their nuclei and cytoplasms. Automating this procedure is still an open problem due to the complexities of cell structures. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach for the segmentation and classification of cervical cells. The segmentation process involves automatic thresholding to separate the cell regions from the background, a multi-scale hierarchical segmentation algorithm to partition these regions based on homogeneity and circularity, a binary classifier to finalize the separation of nuclei from cytoplasm within the cell regions. Classification is posed as a grouping problem by ranking the cells based on their feature characteristics modeling abnormality degrees. The proposed procedure constructs a tree using hierarchical clustering, then arranges the cells in a linear order by using an optimal leaf ordering algorithm that maximizes the similarity of adjacent leaves without any requirement for training examples or parameter adjustment. Performance evaluation using two data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in images having inconsistent staining, poor contrast, overlapping cells. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
Open Access
Utilization of improved recursive-shortest-spanning-tree method for video object segmentation
(1997) Tuncel, Ertem
Emerging standards MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 do not standardize the video object segmentation tools, although their performance depends on them. There are a lot of still image segmentation algorithms in the literature, like clustering, split-and-merge, region merging, etc. One of these methods, namely the recursive shortest spanning tree (RSST) method, is improved so that a still image is approximated as a piecewise planar function, and well-approximated areas on the image are extracted cis regions. A novel video object segmentation algorithm, which takes the previously estimated 2-D dense motion vector field as input, and uses this improved RSST method to approximate each component of the motion vector field as a piecewise planar function, is proposed. The algorithm is successful in locating 3-D planar objects in the scene correctly, with acceptable accuracy at the boundaries. Unlike the existing algorithms in the literature, the proposed algorithm is fast, parameter-free and requires no initial guess about the segmentation result. Moreover, it is a hierarchical scheme which gives finest to coarsest segmentation results. The proposed algorithm is inserted into the current version of the emerging “Analysis Model (AM)” of the Europan COST21U'’’ project, and it is observed that the current AM is outperformed.