Saliency Rank:Two-stage manifold ranking for salient object detection

Salient object detection remains one of the most important and active research topics in computer vision,with wide-ranging applications to object recognition,scene understanding,image retrieval,context aware image editing,image compression,etc. Most existing methods directly determine salient objects by exploring various salient object features.Here,we propose a novel graph based ranking method to detect and segment the most salient object in a scene according to its relationship to image border(background) regions,i.e.,the background feature.Firstly,we use regions/super-pixels as graph nodes,which are fully connected to enable both long range and short range relations to be modeled. The relationship of each region to the image border(background) is evaluated in two stages:(i) ranking with hard background queries,and(ii) ranking with soft foreground queries. We experimentally show how this two-stage ranking based salient object detection method is complementary to traditional methods,and that integrated results outperform both. Our method allows the exploitation of intrinsic image structure to achieve high quality salient object determination using a quadratic optimization framework,with a closed form solution which can be easily computed.Extensive method evaluation and comparison using three challenging saliency datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms 10 state-of-theart models by a big margin.

Syndrome Classification Based on Manifold Ranking for Viral Hepatitis

Treatment determination based on syndrome differentiation is the key of Chinese medicine. A feasible way of improving the clinical therapy effectiveness is needed to correctly differentiate the syndrome classifications based on the clinical manifestations. In this paper, a novel data mining method based on manifold ranking （MR） is proposed to explore the relation between syndromes and symptoms for viral hepatitis. Since MR could take the symptom data with expert differentiation and the symptom data without expert differentiation into the task of syndrome classification, the clinical information used for modeling the syndrome features is greatly enlarged so as to improve the precise of syndrome classification. In addition, the proposed method of syndrome classification could also avoid two disadvantages in previous methods： linear relation of the clinical data and mutually exclusive symptoms among different syndromes. And it could help exploit the latent relation between syndromes and symptoms more effectively. Better performance of syndrome classification is able to be achieved according to the experimental results and the clinical experts.

Saliency Detection via Manifold Ranking Based on Robust Foreground

The graph-based manifold ranking saliency detection only relies on the boundary background to extract foreground seeds,resulting in a poor saliency detection result,so a method that obtains robust foreground for manifold ranking is proposed in this paper.First,boundary connectivity is used to select the boundary background for manifold ranking to get a preliminary saliency map,and a foreground region is acquired by a binary segmentation of the map.Second,the feature points of the original image and the filtered image are obtained by using color boosting Harris corners to generate two different convex hulls.Calculating the intersection of these two convex hulls,a final convex hull is found.Finally,the foreground region and the final convex hull are combined to extract robust foreground seeds for manifold ranking and getting final saliency map.Experimental results on two public image datasets show that the proposed method gains improved performance compared with some other classic methods in three evaluation indicators:precision-recall curve,F-measure and mean absolute error.

Audio Retrieval Based on Manifold Ranking and Relevance Feedback

An audio information retrieval model based on Manifold Ranking(MR) is proposed, and ranking results are improved using a Relevance Feedback(RF) algorithm. Timbre components are employed as the model’s main feature. To compute timbre similarity, extracting the spectrum features for each frame is necessary; the large set of frames is clustered using a Gaussian Mixture Model(GMM) and expectation maximization. The typical spectra frame from GMM is drawn as data points, and MR assigns each data point a relative ranking score, which is treated as a distance instead of as traditional similarity metrics based on pair-wise distance. Furthermore, the MR algorithm can be easily generalized by adding positive and negative examples from the RF algorithm and improves the final result. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively improves the ranking capabilities of existing distance functions.

Robust interactive image segmentation via graph-based manifold ranking

Interactive image segmentation aims at classifying the image pixels into foreground and background classes given some foreground and background markers. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for interactive image segmentation that builds upon graph-based manifold ranking model, a graph-based semi-supervised learning technique which can learn very smooth functions with respect to the intrinsic structure revealed by the input data. The final segmentation results are improved by overcoming two core problems of graph construction in traditional models: graph structure and graph edge weights. The user provided scribbles are treated as the must-link and must-not-link constraints. Then we model the graph as an approximatively k-regular sparse graph by integrating these constraints and our extended neighboring spatial relationships into graph structure modeling. The content and labels driven locally adaptive kernel parameter is proposed to tackle the insufficiency of previous models which usually employ a unified kernel parameter. After the graph construction,a novel three-stage strategy is proposed to get the final segmentation results. Due to the sparsity and extended neighboring relationships of our constructed graph and usage of superpixels, our model can provide nearly real-time, user scribble insensitive segmentations which are two core demands in interactive image segmentation. Last but not least, our framework is very easy to be extended to multi-label segmentation,and for some less complicated scenarios, it can even get the segmented object through single line interaction. Experimental results and comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that our framework can efficiently and accurately extract foreground objects from background.

Ranking with Adaptive Neighbors

Retrieving the most similar objects in a large-scale database for a given query is a fundamental building block in many application domains, ranging from web searches, visual, cross media, to document retrievals. Stateof-the-art approaches have mainly focused on capturing the underlying geometry of the data manifolds. Graphbased approaches, in particular, define various diffusion processes on weighted data graphs. Despite success,these approaches rely on fixed-weight graphs, making ranking sensitive to the input affinity matrix. In this study,we propose a new ranking algorithm that simultaneously learns the data affinity matrix and the ranking scores.The proposed optimization formulation assigns adaptive neighbors to each point in the data based on the local connectivity, and the smoothness constraint assigns similar ranking scores to similar data points. We develop a novel and efficient algorithm to solve the optimization problem. Evaluations using synthetic and real datasets suggest that the proposed algorithm can outperform the existing methods.

A novel classification method for aid decision of traditional Chinese patent medicines for stroke treatment

Traditional Chinese patent medicines are widely used to treat stroke because it has good efficacy in the clinical environment. However, because of the lack of knowledge on traditional Chinese patent medicines, many Western physicians, who are accountable for the majority of clinical prescriptions for such medicine, are confused with the use of traditional Chinese patent medicines. Therefore, the aid-decision method is critical and necessary to help Western physicians rationally use traditional Chinese patent medicines. In this paper, Manifold Ranking is employed to develop the aid-decision model of traditional Chinese patent medicines for stroke treatment. First, 115 stroke patients from three hospitals are recruited in the cross-sectional survey. Simultaneously, traditional Chinese physicians determine the traditional Chinese patent medicines appropriate for each patient. Second, particular indicators are explored to characterize the population feature of traditional Chinese patent medicines for stroke treatment. Moreover, these particular indicators can be easily obtained by Western physicians and are feasible for widespread clinical application in the future. Third, the aid-decision model of traditional Chinese patent medicines for stroke treatment is constructed based on Manifold Ranking. Experimental results reveal that traditional Chinese patent medicines can be differentiated. Moreover, the proposed model can obtain high accuracy of aid decision.

An adaptive segmentation method combining MSRCR and mean shift algorithm with K-means correction of green apples in natural environment

During the recognition and localization process of green apple targets,problems such as uneven illumination,occlusion of branches and leaves need to be solved.In this study,the multi-scale Retinex with color restoration(MSRCR)algorithm was applied to enhance the original green apple images captured in an orchard environment,aiming to minimize the impacts of varying light conditions.The enhanced images were then explicitly segmented using the mean shift algorithm,leading to a consistent gray value of the internal pixels in an independent fruit.After that,the fuzzy attention based on information maximization algorithm(FAIM)was developed to detect the incomplete growth position and realize threshold segmentation.Finally,the poorly segmented images were corrected using the K-means algorithm according to the shape,color and texture features.The users intuitively acquire the minimum enclosing rectangle localization results on a PC.A total of 500 green apple images were tested in this study.Compared with the manifold ranking algorithm,the K-means clustering algorithm and the traditional mean shift algorithm,the segmentation accuracy of the proposed method was 86.67%,which was 13.32%,19.82%and 9.23%higher than that of the other three algorithms,respectively.Additionally,the false positive and false negative errors were 0.58%and 11.64%,respectively,which were all lower than the other three compared algorithms.The proposed method accurately recognized the green apples under complex illumination conditions and growth environments.Additionally,it provided effective references for intelligent growth monitoring and yield estimation of fruits.