In this paper, an effective model-based approach for computer-aided kidney segmentation of abdominal CT images with anatomic structure consideration is presented. This automatic segmentation system is expected to assist physicians in both clinical diagnosis and educational training. The proposed method is a coarse to fine segmentation approach divided into two stages. First, the candidate kidney region is extracted according to the statistical geometric location of kidney within the abdomen. This approach is applicable to images of different sizes by using the relative distance of the kidney region to the spine. The second stage identifies the kidney by a series of image processing operations. The main elements of the proposed system are: 1) the location of the spine is used as the landmark for coordinate references; 2) elliptic candidate kidney region extraction with progressive positioning on the consecutive CT images; 3) novel directional model for a more reliable kidney region seed point identification; and 4) adaptive region growing controlled by the properties of image homogeneity. In addition, in order to provide different views for the physicians, we have implemented a visualization tool that will automatically show the renal contour through the method of second-order neighborhood edge detection. We considered segmentation of kidney regions from CT scans that contain pathologies in clinical practice. The results of a series of tests on 358 images from 30 patients indicate an average correlation coefficient of up to 88% between automatic and manual segmentation.

This paper presents an effective approach for detecting abandoned luggage in surveillance videos. We combine short-and long-term background models to extract foreground objects, where each pixel in an input image is classified as a 2-bit code. Subsequently, we introduce a framework to identify static foreground regions based on the temporal transition of code patterns, and to determine whether the candidate regions contain abandoned objects by analyzing the back-traced trajectories of luggage owners. The experimental results obtained based on video images from 2006 Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance and 2007 Advanced Video and Signal-based Surveillance databases show that the proposed approach is effective for detecting abandoned luggage, and that it outperforms previous methods. Index Terms-Abandoned luggage detection, abandoned object detection, short-term background model, long-term background model, object detection and tracking, visual surveillance.

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