Wide-angle fisheye cameras are commonly used in automated driving for parking and low-speed navigation tasks. Four of such cameras form a surround-view system that provides a complete and detailed view of the vehicle. These cameras are directly exposed to harsh environmental settings and can get soiled very easily by mud, dust, water, frost. Soiling on the camera lens can severely degrade the visual perception algorithms, and a camera cleaning system triggered by a soiling detection algorithm is increasingly being deployed. While adverse weather conditions, such as rain, are getting attention recently, there is only limited work on general soiling. The main reason is the difficulty in collecting a diverse dataset as it is a relatively rare event.We propose a novel GAN based algorithm for generating unseen patterns of soiled images. Additionally, the proposed method automatically provides the corresponding soiling masks eliminating the manual annotation cost. Augmentation of the generated soiled images for training improves the accuracy of soiling detection tasks significantly by 18% demonstrating its usefulness. The manually annotated soiling dataset and the generated augmentation dataset will be made public. We demonstrate the generalization of our fisheye trained GAN model on the Cityscapes dataset. We provide an empirical evaluation of the degradation of the semantic segmentation algorithm with the soiled data.

UNLABELLED: SIMToolbox is an open-source, modular set of functions for MATLAB equipped with a user-friendly graphical interface and designed for processing two-dimensional and three-dimensional data acquired by structured illumination microscopy (SIM). Both optical sectioning and super-resolution applications are supported. The software is also capable of maximum a posteriori probability image estimation (MAP-SIM), an alternative method for reconstruction of structured illumination images. MAP-SIM can potentially reduce reconstruction artifacts, which commonly occur due to refractive index mismatch within the sample and to imperfections in the illumination. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: SIMToolbox, example data and the online documentation are freely accessible at http://mmtg.fel.cvut.cz/SIMToolbox. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: Automatic tracking of cells in multidimensional time-lapse fluorescence microscopy is an important task in many biomedical applications. A novel framework for objective evaluation of cell tracking algorithms has been established under the auspices of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging 2013 Cell Tracking Challenge. In this article, we present the logistics, datasets, methods and results of the challenge and lay down the principles for future uses of this benchmark. RESULTS: The main contributions of the challenge include the creation of a comprehensive video dataset repository and the definition of objective measures for comparison and ranking of the algorithms. With this benchmark, six algorithms covering a variety of segmentation and tracking paradigms have been compared and ranked based on their performance on both synthetic and real datasets. Given the diversity of the datasets, we do not declare a single winner of the challenge. Instead, we present and discuss the results for each individual dataset separately. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The challenge Web site (http://www.codesolorzano.com/celltrackingchallenge) provides access to the training and competition datasets, along with the ground truth of the training videos. It also provides access to Windows and Linux executable files of the evaluation software and most of the algorithms that competed in the challenge.

UNLABELLED: ThunderSTORM is an open-source, interactive and modular plug-in for ImageJ designed for automated processing, analysis and visualization of data acquired by single-molecule localization microscopy methods such as photo-activated localization microscopy and stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy. ThunderSTORM offers an extensive collection of processing and post-processing methods so that users can easily adapt the process of analysis to their data. ThunderSTORM also offers a set of tools for creation of simulated data and quantitative performance evaluation of localization algorithms using Monte Carlo simulations. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ThunderSTORM and the online documentation are both freely accessible at https://code.google.com/p/thunder-storm/.

A new unsupervised filter-based feature selection method is introduced. Its principle consists in merging similar features into clusters using a distance measure derived from the correlation coefficient. Subsequently, only one representative feature is selected from each cluster. In experiments with real-world data, we show that the proposed method is benefical as a pre-filtering step for more sophisticated feature selection techniques.