Gradient extraction is important for a lot of metrological applications such as Control Quality by Vision. In this work, we propose a full-vector gradient for multi-spectral sensors. The full-vector gradient extends Di Zenzo expression to take into account the non-orthogonality of the acquisition channels thanks to a Gram matrix. This expression is generic and independent from channel count. Results are provided for a color and a multi-spectral snapshot sensor. Then, we show the accuracy improvement of the gradient calculation by creating a dedicated objective test and from real images.

A great deal of features detectors and descriptors are proposed every years for several computer vision applications. In this paper, we concentrate on dense detector applied to different descriptors. Eight descriptors are compared, three from gradient based family (SIFT, SURF, DAISY), others from binary category (BRIEF, ORB, BRISK, FREAK and LATCH). These descriptors are created and defined with certain invariance properties. We want to verify their invariances with various geometric and photometric transformations, varying one at a time. Deformations are computed from an original image. Descriptors are tested on five transformations: scale, rotation, viewpoint, illumination plus reflection. Overall, descriptors display the right invariances. This paper's objective is to establish a reproducible protocol to test descriptors invariances.

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems retrieve the most similar images to a query image in a collection. One of the most popular models and widely applied in this task is the Bag of Visual Words model (BoVW). In this paper, we introduce an evaluation study of different information gain models used for the construction of a visual word vocabulary. In the proposed framework, the information gain is used as discriminative information to index image features and select the ones that have the highest values of information gain. The empirical experiments made for this study evaluate the effect of four different information gain models: tf-idf, entropy, bm25, tfc with respect to different descriptors and image databases. The results show that selecting the image features based on at least one of the studied information gain model allows the retrieval process to be more accurate than the classical Bag of Visual Words model.

In this paper we propose a rigorous framework for texture image segmentation relying on region-based active contours (RBAC) and sparse texture representation. Such representations allow to efficiently describe a texture by transforming it in a dictionary of appropriate waveforms (atoms) where the texture representation coefficients are concentrated on a small set. For segmentation purposes. these atoms have to be multiscale and localized both in space and frequency, e.g. the wavelet transform. To discriminate different textures, we measure a ldquodistancerdquo between the non-parametric Parzen estimates of their respective sparse-representation coefficients probability density functions (pdfs). These distance measures are then used within RBAC, and we take benefit from shape derivative tools to derive the evolution speed expression of the RBAC. Our framework is applied to both supervised (with reference textures), and unsupervised texture segmentation. A series of experiments on synthetic textures illustrate the potential applicability of our method.

In this paper, we focus on statistical region-based active contour models where image features (e.g. intensity) are random variables whose distribution belongs to some parametric family (e.g. exponential) rather than confining ourselves to the special Gaussian case. Using shape derivation tools, our effort focuses on constructing a general expression for the derivative of the energy (with respect to a domain) and derive the corresponding evolution speed. A general result is stated within the framework of multi-parameter exponential family. More particularly, when using maximum likelihood estimators, the evolution speed has a closed-form expression that depends simply on the probability density function, while complicating additive terms appear when using other estimators, e.g. moments method. Experimental results on both synthesized and real images demonstrate the applicability of our approach

In this paper, we propose to combine formally noise and shape priors in region-based active contours. On the one hand, we use the general framework of exponential family as a prior model for noise. On the other hand, translation and scale invariant Legendre moments are considered to incorporate the shape prior (e.g. fidelity to a reference shape). The combination of the two prior terms in the active contour functional yields the final evolution equation whose evolution speed is rigorously derived using shape derivative tools. Experimental results on both synthetic images and real life cardiac echography data clearly demonstrate the robustness to initialization and noise, flexibility and large potential applicability of our segmentation algorithm.