Infrared image segmentation method based on 2D histogram shape modification and optimal objective function

In the methods of image thresholding segmentation, such methods based on two-dimensional （2D） histogram and optimal objective functions are important. However, when they are used for infrared image segmentation, they are weak in suppressing background noises and worse in segmenting targets with non-uniform gray level. The concept of 2D histogram shape modification is proposed, which is realized by target information prior restraint after enhancing target information using plateau histogram equalization. The formula of 2D minimum Renyi entropy is deduced for image segmentation, then the shape-modified 2D histogram is combined wfth four optimal objective functions （i.e., maximum between-class variance, maximum entropy, maximum correlation and minimum Renyi entropy） respectively for the appli- cation of infrared image segmentation. Simultaneously, F-measure is introduced to evaluate the segmentation effects objectively. The experimental results show that F-measure is an effective evaluation index for image segmentation since its value is fully consistent with the subjective evaluation, and after 2D histogram shape modification, the methods of optimal objective functions can overcome their original forms＇ deficiency and their segmentation effects are more or less improvements, where the best one is the maximum entropy method based on 2D histogram shape modification.

Medical ultrasound image segmentation by modified local histogram range image method

Fast and satisfied medical ultrasound segmentation is known to be difficult due to speckle noises and other artificial effects. Since speckle noise is formed from random signals which are emitted by an ultrasound system, we can’t encounter the same way as other image noises. Lack of information in ultrasound images is another problem. Thus, segmentation results may not be accurate enough by means of customary image segmentation methods. Those methods that can specify undesirable effects and segment them by eliminating artificial effects, should be chosen. It seems to be a complicated work with high computational load. The current study presents a different approach to ultrasound image segmentation that relies mainly on local evaluation, named as local histogram range image method which is modified by means of discrete wavelet transform. Thus, a significant decrease in computational load is then achieved. The results show that it is possible for tissues to be segmented correctly.

Unsupervised Color Segmentation with Reconstructed Spatial Weighted Gaussian Mixture Model and Random Color Histogram

Image classification and unsupervised image segmentation can be achieved using the Gaussian mixture model.Although the Gaussian mixture model enhances the flexibility of image segmentation,it does not reflect spatial information and is sensitive to the segmentation parameter.In this study,we first present an efficient algorithm that incorporates spatial information into the Gaussian mixture model(GMM)without parameter estimation.The proposed model highlights the residual region with considerable information and constructs color saliency.Second,we incorporate the content-based color saliency as spatial information in the Gaussian mixture model.The segmentation is performed by clustering each pixel into an appropriate component according to the expectation maximization and maximum criteria.Finally,the random color histogram assigns a unique color to each cluster and creates an attractive color by default for segmentation.A random color histogram serves as an effective tool for data visualization and is instrumental in the creation of generative art,facilitating both analytical and aesthetic objectives.For experiments,we have used the Berkeley segmentation dataset BSDS-500 and Microsoft Research in Cambridge dataset.In the study,the proposed model showcases notable advancements in unsupervised image segmentation,with probabilistic rand index(PRI)values reaching 0.80,BDE scores as low as 12.25 and 12.02,compactness variations at 0.59 and 0.7,and variation of information(VI)reduced to 2.0 and 1.49 for the BSDS-500 and MSRC datasets,respectively,outperforming current leading-edge methods and yielding more precise segmentations.

DCFNet:An Effective Dual-Branch Cross-Attention Fusion Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of medical images provides a reliable scientific basis for disease diagnosis and analysis.Notably,most existing methods that combine the strengths of convolutional neural networks(CNNs)and Transformers have made significant progress.However,there are some limitations in the current integration of CNN and Transformer technology in two key aspects.Firstly,most methods either overlook or fail to fully incorporate the complementary nature between local and global features.Secondly,the significance of integrating the multiscale encoder features from the dual-branch network to enhance the decoding features is often disregarded in methods that combine CNN and Transformer.To address this issue,we present a groundbreaking dual-branch cross-attention fusion network(DCFNet),which efficiently combines the power of Swin Transformer and CNN to generate complementary global and local features.We then designed the Feature Cross-Fusion(FCF)module to efficiently fuse local and global features.In the FCF,the utilization of the Channel-wise Cross-fusion Transformer(CCT)serves the purpose of aggregatingmulti-scale features,and the Feature FusionModule(FFM)is employed to effectively aggregate dual-branch prominent feature regions from the spatial perspective.Furthermore,within the decoding phase of the dual-branch network,our proposed Channel Attention Block(CAB)aims to emphasize the significance of the channel features between the up-sampled features and the features generated by the FCFmodule to enhance the details of the decoding.Experimental results demonstrate that DCFNet exhibits enhanced accuracy in segmentation performance.Compared to other state-of-the-art(SOTA)methods,our segmentation framework exhibits a superior level of competitiveness.DCFNet’s accurate segmentation of medical images can greatly assist medical professionals in making crucial diagnoses of lesion areas in advance.

ATFF: Advanced Transformer with Multiscale Contextual Fusion for Medical Image Segmentation

Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) greatly promotes the automatic segmentation of medical images. However, due to the inherent properties of convolution operations, CNN usually cannot establish long-distance interdependence, which limits the segmentation performance. Transformer has been successfully applied to various computer vision, using self-attention mechanism to simulate long-distance interaction, so as to capture global information. However, self-attention lacks spatial location and high-performance computing. In order to solve the above problems, we develop a new medical transformer, which has a multi-scale context fusion function and can be used for medical image segmentation. The proposed model combines convolution operation and attention mechanism to form a u-shaped framework, which can capture both local and global information. First, the traditional converter module is improved to an advanced converter module, which uses post-layer normalization to obtain mild activation values, and uses scaled cosine attention with a moving window to obtain accurate spatial information. Secondly, we also introduce a deep supervision strategy to guide the model to fuse multi-scale feature information. It further enables the proposed model to effectively propagate feature information across layers, Thanks to this, it can achieve better segmentation performance while being more robust and efficient. The proposed model is evaluated on multiple medical image segmentation datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance on a challenging dataset (ETIS) compared to existing methods that rely only on convolutional neural networks, transformers, or a combination of both. The mDice and mIou indicators increased by 2.74% and 3.3% respectively.

Two-Staged Method for Ice Channel Identification Based on Image Segmentation and Corner Point Regression

Identification of the ice channel is the basic technology for developing intelligent ships in ice-covered waters,which is important to ensure the safety and economy of navigation.In the Arctic,merchant ships with low ice class often navigate in channels opened up by icebreakers.Navigation in the ice channel often depends on good maneuverability skills and abundant experience from the captain to a large extent.The ship may get stuck if steered into ice fields off the channel.Under this circumstance,it is very important to study how to identify the boundary lines of ice channels with a reliable method.In this paper,a two-staged ice channel identification method is developed based on image segmentation and corner point regression.The first stage employs the image segmentation method to extract channel regions.In the second stage,an intelligent corner regression network is proposed to extract the channel boundary lines from the channel region.A non-intelligent angle-based filtering and clustering method is proposed and compared with corner point regression network.The training and evaluation of the segmentation method and corner regression network are carried out on the synthetic and real ice channel dataset.The evaluation results show that the accuracy of the method using the corner point regression network in the second stage is achieved as high as 73.33%on the synthetic ice channel dataset and 70.66%on the real ice channel dataset,and the processing speed can reach up to 14.58frames per second.

Transfer learning from T1-weighted to T2-weighted Magnetic resonance sequences for brain image segmentation

Magnetic resonance(MR)imaging is a widely employed medical imaging technique that produces detailed anatomical images of the human body.The segmentation of MR im-ages plays a crucial role in medical image analysis,as it enables accurate diagnosis,treatment planning,and monitoring of various diseases and conditions.Due to the lack of sufficient medical images,it is challenging to achieve an accurate segmentation,especially with the application of deep learning networks.The aim of this work is to study transfer learning from T1-weighted(T1-w)to T2-weighted(T2-w)MR sequences to enhance bone segmentation with minimal required computation resources.With the use of an excitation-based convolutional neural networks,four transfer learning mechanisms are proposed:transfer learning without fine tuning,open fine tuning,conservative fine tuning,and hybrid transfer learning.Moreover,a multi-parametric segmentation model is proposed using T2-w MR as an intensity-based augmentation technique.The novelty of this work emerges in the hybrid transfer learning approach that overcomes the overfitting issue and preserves the features of both modalities with minimal computation time and resources.The segmentation results are evaluated using 14 clinical 3D brain MR and CT images.The results reveal that hybrid transfer learning is superior for bone segmentation in terms of performance and computation time with DSCs of 0.5393±0.0007.Although T2-w-based augmentation has no significant impact on the performance of T1-w MR segmentation,it helps in improving T2-w MR segmentation and developing a multi-sequences segmentation model.

An Efficient Local Radial Basis Function Method for Image Segmentation Based on the Chan-Vese Model

In this paper,we consider the Chan–Vese(C-V)model for image segmentation and obtain its numerical solution accurately and efficiently.For this purpose,we present a local radial basis function method based on a Gaussian kernel(GA-LRBF)for spatial discretization.Compared to the standard radial basis functionmethod,this approach consumes less CPU time and maintains good stability because it uses only a small subset of points in the whole computational domain.Additionally,since the Gaussian function has the property of dimensional separation,the GA-LRBF method is suitable for dealing with isotropic images.Finally,a numerical scheme that couples GA-LRBF with the fourth-order Runge–Kutta method is applied to the C-V model,and a comparison of some numerical results demonstrates that this scheme achieves much more reliable image segmentation.

Application of U-Net and Optimized Clustering in Medical Image Segmentation:A Review

As a mainstream research direction in the field of image segmentation,medical image segmentation plays a key role in the quantification of lesions,three-dimensional reconstruction,region of interest extraction and so on.Compared with natural images,medical images have a variety of modes.Besides,the emphasis of information which is conveyed by images of different modes is quite different.Because it is time-consuming and inefficient to manually segment medical images only by professional and experienced doctors.Therefore,large quantities of automated medical image segmentation methods have been developed.However,until now,researchers have not developed a universal method for all types of medical image segmentation.This paper reviews the literature on segmentation techniques that have produced major breakthroughs in recent years.Among the large quantities of medical image segmentation methods,this paper mainly discusses two categories of medical image segmentation methods.One is the improved strategies based on traditional clustering method.The other is the research progress of the improved image segmentation network structure model based on U-Net.The power of technology proves that the performance of the deep learning-based method is significantly better than that of the traditional method.This paper discussed both advantages and disadvantages of different algorithms and detailed how these methods can be used for the segmentation of lesions or other organs and tissues,as well as possible technical trends for future work.

Hand segmentation from a single depth image based on histogram threshold selection and shallow CNN

Real-time hand gesture recognition technology significantly improves the user's experience for virtual reality/augmented reality(VR/AR) applications, which relies on the identification of the orientation of the hand in captured images or videos. A new three-stage pipeline approach for fast and accurate hand segmentation for the hand from a single depth image is proposed. Firstly, a depth frame is segmented into several regions by histogrambased threshold selection algorithm and by tracing the exterior boundaries of objects after thresholding. Secondly, each segmentation proposal is evaluated by a three-layers shallow convolutional neural network(CNN) to determine whether or not the boundary is associated with the hand. Finally, all hand components are merged as the hand segmentation result. Compared with algorithms based on random decision forest(RDF), the experimental results demonstrate that the approach achieves better performance with high-accuracy(88.34% mean intersection over union, mIoU) and a shorter processing time(≤8 ms).

Histogram-Based Decision Support System for Extraction and Classification of Leukemia in Blood Smear Images

An abnormality that develops in white blood cells is called leukemia.The diagnosis of leukemia is made possible by microscopic investigation of the smear in the periphery.Prior training is necessary to complete the morphological examination of the blood smear for leukemia diagnosis.This paper proposes a Histogram Threshold Segmentation Classifier(HTsC)for a decision support system.The proposed HTsC is evaluated based on the color and brightness variation in the dataset of blood smear images.Arithmetic operations are used to crop the nucleus based on automated approximation.White Blood Cell(WBC)segmentation is calculated using the active contour model to determine the contrast between image regions using the color transfer approach.Through entropy-adaptive mask generation,WBCs accurately detect the circularity region for identification of the nucleus.The proposed HTsC addressed the cytoplasm region based on variations in size and shape concerning addition and rotation operations.Variation in WBC imaging characteristics depends on the cytoplasmic and nuclear regions.The computation of the variation between image features in the cytoplasm and nuclei regions of the WBCs is used to classify blood smear images.The classification of the blood smear is performed with conventional machine-learning techniques integrated with the features of the deep-learning regression classifier.The designed HTsC classifier comprises the binary classifier with the classification of the lymphocytes,monocytes,neutrophils,eosinophils,and abnormalities in the WBCs.The proposed HTsC identifies the abnormal activity in the WBC,considering the color and shape features.It exhibits a higher classification accuracy value of 99.6%when combined with the other classifiers.The comparative analysis expressed that the proposed HTsC model exhibits an overall accuracy value of 98%,which is approximately 3%–12%higher than the conventional technique.

TC-Fuse: A Transformers Fusing CNNs Network for Medical Image Segmentation

In medical image segmentation task,convolutional neural networks(CNNs)are difficult to capture long-range dependencies,but transformers can model the long-range dependencies effectively.However,transformers have a flexible structure and seldom assume the structural bias of input data,so it is difficult for transformers to learn positional encoding of the medical images when using fewer images for training.To solve these problems,a dual branch structure is proposed.In one branch,Mix-Feed-Forward Network(Mix-FFN)and axial attention are adopted to capture long-range dependencies and keep the translation invariance of the model.Mix-FFN whose depth-wise convolutions can provide position information is better than ordinary positional encoding.In the other branch,traditional convolutional neural networks(CNNs)are used to extract different features of fewer medical images.In addition,the attention fusion module BiFusion is used to effectively integrate the information from the CNN branch and Transformer branch,and the fused features can effectively capture the global and local context of the current spatial resolution.On the public standard datasets Gland Segmentation(GlaS),Colorectal adenocarcinoma gland(CRAG)and COVID-19 CT Images Segmentation,the F1-score,Intersection over Union(IoU)and parameters of the proposed TC-Fuse are superior to those by Axial Attention U-Net,U-Net,Medical Transformer and other methods.And F1-score increased respectively by 2.99%,3.42%and 3.95%compared with Medical Transformer.

Unsupervised Segmentation Method of Multicomponent Images based on Fuzzy Connectivity Analysis in the Multidimensional Histograms

Image segmentation denotes a process for partitioning an image into distinct regions, it plays an important role in interpretation and decision making. A large variety of segmentation methods has been developed;among them, multidimensional histogram methods have been investigated but their implementation stays difficult due to the big size of histograms. We present an original method for segmenting n-D (where n is the number of components in image) images or multidimensional images in an unsupervised way using a fuzzy neighbourhood model. It is based on the hierarchical analysis of full n-D compact histograms integrating a fuzzy connected components labelling algorithm that we have realized in this work. Each peak of the histo- gram constitutes a class kernel, as soon as it encloses a number of pixels greater than or equal to a secondary arbitrary threshold knowing that a first threshold was set to define the degree of binary fuzzy similarity be- tween pixels. The use of a lossless compact n-D histogram allows a drastic reduction of the memory space necessary for coding it. As a consequence, the segmentation can be achieved without reducing the colors population of images in the classification step. It is shown that using n-D compact histograms, instead of 1-D and 2-D ones, leads to better segmentation results. Various images were segmented;the evaluation of the quality of segmentation in supervised and unsupervised of segmentation method proposed compare to the classification method k-means gives better results. It thus highlights the relevance of our approach, which can be used for solving many problems of segmentation.

A Semi-Vectorial Hybrid Morphological Segmentation of Multicomponent Images Based on Multithreshold Analysis of Multidimensional Compact Histogram

In this work, we propose an original approach of semi-vectorial hybrid morphological segmentation for multicomponent images or multidimensional data by analyzing compact multidimensional histograms based on different orders. Its principle consists first of segment marginally each component of the multicomponent image into different numbers of classes fixed at K. The segmentation of each component of the image uses a scalar segmentation strategy by histogram analysis;we mainly count the methods by searching for peaks or modes of the histogram and those based on a multi-thresholding of the histogram. It is the latter that we have used in this paper, it relies particularly on the multi-thresholding method of OTSU. Then, in the case where i) each component of the image admits exactly K classes, K vector thresholds are constructed by an optimal pairing of which each component of the vector thresholds are those resulting from the marginal segmentations. In addition, the multidimensional compact histogram of the multicomponent image is computed and the attribute tuples or ‘colors’ of the histogram are ordered relative to the threshold vectors to produce (K + 1) intervals in the partial order giving rise to a segmentation of the multidimensional histogram into K classes. The remaining colors of the histogram are assigned to the closest class relative to their center of gravity. ii) In the contrary case, a vectorial spatial matching between the classes of the scalar components of the image is produced to obtain an over-segmentation, then an interclass fusion is performed to obtain a maximum of K classes. Indeed, the relevance of our segmentation method has been highlighted in relation to other methods, such as K-means, using unsupervised and supervised quantitative segmentation evaluation criteria. So the robustness of our method relatively to noise has been tested.

Dual-Branch-UNet: A Dual-Branch Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation

In intelligent perception and diagnosis of medical equipment,the visual and morphological changes in retinal vessels are closely related to the severity of cardiovascular diseases(e.g.,diabetes and hypertension).Intelligent auxiliary diagnosis of these diseases depends on the accuracy of the retinal vascular segmentation results.To address this challenge,we design a Dual-Branch-UNet framework,which comprises a Dual-Branch encoder structure for feature extraction based on the traditional U-Net model for medical image segmentation.To be more explicit,we utilize a novel parallel encoder made up of various convolutional modules to enhance the encoder portion of the original U-Net.Then,image features are combined at each layer to produce richer semantic data and the model’s capacity is adjusted to various input images.Meanwhile,in the lower sampling section,we give up pooling and conduct the lower sampling by convolution operation to control step size for information fusion.We also employ an attentionmodule in the decoder stage to filter the image noises so as to lessen the response of irrelevant features.Experiments are verified and compared on the DRIVE and ARIA datasets for retinal vessels segmentation.The proposed Dual-Branch-UNet has proved to be superior to other five typical state-of-the-art methods.

Deep Learning for Image Segmentation: A Focus on Medical Imaging

Image segmentation is crucial for various research areas. Manycomputer vision applications depend on segmenting images to understandthe scene, such as autonomous driving, surveillance systems, robotics, andmedical imaging. With the recent advances in deep learning (DL) and itsconfounding results in image segmentation, more attention has been drawnto its use in medical image segmentation. This article introduces a surveyof the state-of-the-art deep convolution neural network (CNN) models andmechanisms utilized in image segmentation. First, segmentation models arecategorized based on their model architecture and primary working principle.Then, CNN categories are described, and various models are discussed withineach category. Compared with other existing surveys, several applicationswith multiple architectural adaptations are discussed within each category.A comparative summary is included to give the reader insights into utilizedarchitectures in different applications and datasets. This study focuses onmedical image segmentation applications, where the most widely used architecturesare illustrated, and other promising models are suggested that haveproven their success in different domains. Finally, the present work discussescurrent limitations and solutions along with future trends in the field.

LGNet:Local and global representation learning for fast biomedical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in clinical diagnosis and therapy systems,yet still faces many challenges.Building on convolutional neural networks(CNNs),medical image segmentation has achieved tremendous progress.However,owing to the locality of convolution operations,CNNs have the inherent limitation in learning global context.To address the limitation in building global context relationship from CNNs,we propose LGNet,a semantic segmentation network aiming to learn local and global features for fast and accurate medical image segmentation in this paper.Specifically,we employ a two-branch architecture consisting of convolution layers in one branch to learn local features and transformer layers in the other branch to learn global features.LGNet has two key insights:(1)We bridge two-branch to learn local and global features in an interactive way;(2)we present a novel multi-feature fusion model(MSFFM)to leverage the global contexture information from transformer and the local representational features from convolutions.Our method achieves state-of-the-art trade-off in terms of accuracy and efficiency on several medical image segmentation benchmarks including Synapse,ACDC and MOST.Specifically,LGNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance with Dice's indexes of 80.15%on Synapse,of 91.70%on ACDC,and of 95.56%on MOST.Meanwhile,the inference speed attains at 172 frames per second with 224-224 input resolution.The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LGNet for fast and accurate for medical image segmentation.

An Improved Soft Subspace Clustering Algorithm for Brain MR Image Segmentation

In recent years,the soft subspace clustering algorithm has shown good results for high-dimensional data,which can assign different weights to each cluster class and use weights to measure the contribution of each dimension in various features.The enhanced soft subspace clustering algorithm combines interclass separation and intraclass tightness information,which has strong results for image segmentation,but the clustering algorithm is vulnerable to noisy data and dependence on the initialized clustering center.However,the clustering algorithmis susceptible to the influence of noisydata and reliance on initializedclustering centers andfalls into a local optimum;the clustering effect is poor for brain MR images with unclear boundaries and noise effects.To address these problems,a soft subspace clustering algorithm for brain MR images based on genetic algorithm optimization is proposed,which combines the generalized noise technique,relaxes the equational weight constraint in the objective function as the boundary constraint,and uses a genetic algorithm as a method to optimize the initialized clustering center.The genetic algorithm finds the best clustering center and reduces the algorithm’s dependence on the initial clustering center.The experiment verifies the robustness of the algorithm,as well as the noise immunity in various ways and shows good results on the common dataset and the brain MR images provided by the Changshu First People’s Hospital with specific high accuracy for clinical medicine.

An image segmentation method of pulverized coal for particle size analysis

An important index to evaluate the process efficiency of coal preparation is the mineral liberation degree of pulverized coal,which is greatly influenced by the particle size and shape distribution acquired by image segmentation.However,the agglomeration effect of fine powders and the edge effect of granular images caused by scanning electron microscopy greatly affect the precision of particle image segmentation.In this study,we propose a novel image segmentation method derived from mask regional convolutional neural network based on deep learning for recognizing fine coal powders.Firstly,an atrous convolution is introduced into our network to learn the image feature of multi-sized powders,which can reduce the missing segmentation of small-sized agglomerated particles.Then,a new mask loss function combing focal loss and dice coefficient is used to overcome the false segmentation caused by the edge effect.The final comparative experimental results show that our method achieves the best results of 94.43%and 91.44%on AP50 and AP75 respectively among the comparison algorithms.In addition,in order to provide an effective method for particle size analysis of coal particles,we study the particle size distribution of coal powders based on the proposed image segmentation method and obtain a good curve relationship between cumulative mass fraction and particle size.

Generative Deep Belief Model for Improved Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image assessment is based on segmentation at its fundamental stage.Deep neural networks have been more popular for segmentation work in recent years.However,the quality of labels has an impact on the training performance of these algorithms,particularly in the medical image domain,where both the interpretation cost and inter-observer variation are considerable.For this reason,a novel optimized deep learning approach is proposed for medical image segmentation.Optimization plays an important role in terms of resources used,accuracy,and the time taken.The noise in the raw medical image are processed using Quasi-Continuous Wavelet Transform(QCWT).Then,feature extraction and selection are done after the pre-processing of the image.The features are optimally selected by the Golden Eagle Optimization(GEO)method.Specifically,the processed image is segmented accurately using the proposed Generative Heap Belief Network(GHBN)technique.The execution of this research is done on MATLAB software.According to the results of the experiments,the proposed framework is superior to current techniques in terms of segmentation performance with a valid accuracy of 99%,which is comparable to the other methods.