• Journal of Advanced Information Technology and Convergence
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.103-113
• /
• 2019

Motivation: Polymerized actin-based cytoskeletal structures are crucial in shape, dynamics, and resilience of a cell. For example, dynamical actin-containing ruffles are located at leading edges of cells and have a significant impact on cell motility. Other filamentous actin (F-actin) bundles, called stress fibers, are essential in cell attachment and detachment. For this reason, their mechanistic understanding provides crucial information to solve practical problems related to cell interactions with materials in tissue engineering. Detecting and counting actin-based structures in a cellular ensemble is a fundamental first step. In this research, we suggest a new method to characterize F-actin wrapping fibers from confocal fluorescence image stacks. As fluorescently labeled F-actin often envelope the fibers, we first propose to segment these fibers by diminishing an energy based on maximum flow and minimum cut algorithm. The actual actin is detected through the use of bilateral filtering followed by a thresholding step. Later, concave actin bundles are detected through a graph-based procedure that actually determines if the considered actin filament is enclosing the fiber.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.21 no.2
• /
• pp.260-267
• /
• 2011

This paper proposes a method for segmenting objects from the background in IR(Infrared) images based on GrabCut algorithm. The GrabCut algorithm needs the window encompassing the interesting known object. This procedure is processed by user. However, to apply it for object recognition problems in image sequences. the location of window should be determined automatically. For this, we adopted the Otsu' algorithm for segmenting the interesting but unknown objects in an image coarsely. After applying the Otsu' algorithm, the window is located automatically by blob analysis. The GrabCut algorithm needs the probability distributions of both the candidate object region and the background region surrounding closely the object for estimating the Gaussian mixture models(GMMs) of the object and the background. The probability distribution of the background is computed from the background window, which has the same number of pixels within the candidate object region. Experiments for various IR images show that the proposed method is proper to segment out the interesting object in IR image sequences. To evaluate performance of proposed segmentation method, we compare other segmentation methods.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
• /
• v.13D no.7 s.110
• /
• pp.1017-1026
• /
• 2006

Recently, distributed collaborative development environment has been recognized an alternative environment for product development in which multidisciplinary participants are naturally involving. Reuse of Product design information has long been recognized as one of core requirements for efficient product development. This paper addresses an image-based retrieval system to support product design information reuse. In the system, product images obtained from multi-modal devices are utilized to reuse design information. The proposed system conducts the segmentation of a product image by using a labeling method and generates an attributed relational graph (ARG) that represents properties of segmented regions and their relationships. The generated ARG is extended by integrating corresponding part/assembly information. In this manner, the reuse of assembly design information using a product image has been realized. The main advantages of the presented system are following. First, the system is not dependent to specific design tools, because it utilizes multimedia images that can be obtained easily from peripheral devices. Second ratio-based features extracted from images enable image retrievals that contain various sizes of parts. Third, the system has shown outstanding search performance, because we applied various information of segmented part regions and their relationships between parts.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
• /
• 2008.06a
• /
• pp.281-282
• /
• 2008

• Journal of Advanced Information Technology and Convergence
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.89-102
• /
• 2019

Collagen can be used in building artificial skin replacements for treatment of burns and towards the reconstruction of bone as well as researching cell behavior and cellular interaction. The strength of collagen in connective tissue rests on the characteristics of collagen fibers. 3D confocal imaging of collagen fibers enables the characterization of their spatial distribution as related to their function. However, the image stacks acquired with confocal laser-scanning microscope does not clearly show the collagen architecture in 3D. Therefore, we developed a new method to reconstruct, visualize and characterize collagen fibers from fluorescence confocal images. First, we exploit the tensor voting framework to extract sparse reliable information about collagen structure in a 3D image and therefore denoise and filter the acquired image stack. We then propose to segment the collagen fibers by defining an energy term based on the Hessian matrix. This energy term is minimized by a min cut-max flow algorithm that allows adaptive regularization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methods by visualizing reconstructed collagen from specific 3D image stack.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.23 no.12
• /
• pp.1520-1527
• /
• 2019

Superpixel methods are widely used in the preprocessing stage as a method to reduce computational complexity by simplifying images while maintaining the characteristics of images in the field of computer vision. It is common to generate superpixels with a regular size and form based on the pixel values rather than considering the characteristics of the image. In this paper, we propose a method to generate superpixels considering the characteristics of an image according to the application. The proposed method consists of two steps, and the first step is to oversegment an image so that the boundary information of the image is well preserved. In the second step, superpixels are merged based on similarity to produce the desired number of superpixels, where the form of superpixels are controlled by limiting the maximum size of superpixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method preserves the boundaries of an image more accurately than the existing method.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.10 no.4
• /
• pp.1712-1731
• /
• 2016

In this paper, we propose a novel saliency detection framework via multiple random walks (MRW) which simulate multiple agents on a graph simultaneously. In the MRW system, two agents, which represent the seeds of background and foreground, traverse the graph according to a transition matrix, and interact with each other to achieve a state of equilibrium. The proposed algorithm is divided into three steps. First, an initial segmentation is performed to partition an input image into homogeneous regions (i.e., superpixels) for saliency computation. Based on the regions of image, we construct a graph that the nodes correspond to the superpixels in the image, and the edges between neighboring nodes represent the similarities of the corresponding superpixels. Second, to generate the seeds of background, we first filter out one of the four boundaries that most unlikely belong to the background. The superpixels on each of the three remaining sides of the image will be labeled as the seeds of background. To generate the seeds of foreground, we utilize the center prior that foreground objects tend to appear near the image center. In last step, the seeds of foreground and background are treated as two different agents in multiple random walkers to complete the process of salient object detection. Experimental results on three benchmark databases demonstrate the proposed method performs well when it against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
• /
• 2016.10a
• /
• pp.733-734
• /
• 2016

This study proposes a novel approach for ground segmentation of 3D point cloud. We combine two techniques: gradient threshold segmentation, and mean height evaluation. Acquired 3D point cloud is represented as a graph data structures by exploiting the structure of 2D reference image. The ground parts nearing the position of the sensor are segmented based on gradient threshold technique. For sparse regions, we separate the ground and nonground by using a technique called mean height evaluation. The main contribution of this study is a new ground segmentation algorithm which works well with 3D point clouds from various environments. The processing time is acceptable and it allows the algorithm running in real time.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.48 no.1
• /
• pp.33-45
• /
• 2011

In this paper, we present a method for extracting video objects efficiently by using the modified graph cut algorithm based on contour information. First, we extract objects at the first frame by an automatic object extraction algorithm or the user interaction. To estimate the objects' contours at the current frame, motion information of objects' contour in the previous frame is analyzed. Block-based histogram back-projection is conducted along the estimated contour point. Each color model of objects and background can be generated from back-projection images. The probabilities of links between neighboring pixels are decided by the logarithmic based distance transform map obtained from the estimated contour image. Energy of the graph is defined by predefined color models and logarithmic distance transform map. Finally, the object is extracted by minimizing the energy. Experimental results of various test images show that our algorithm works more accurately than other methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.51 no.5
• /
• pp.137-151
• /
• 2014

This paper proposes a method of detecting object of interest(OOI) in general natural images. OOI is subjectively estimated by human in images. The vision of human, in general, might focus on OOI. As the first step for automatic detection of OOI, candidate regions of OOI are detected by using a saliency map based on the human visual perception. A saliency map locates an approximate OOI, but there is a problem that they are not accurately segmented. In order to address this problem, in the second step, an exact object region is automatically detected by combining graph-based image segmentation and skeletonization. In this paper, we calculate the precision, recall and accuracy to compare the performance of the proposed method to existing methods. In experimental results, the proposed method has achieved better performance than existing methods by reducing the problems such as under detection and over detection.