No abstract

ÐOur goal is to develop a visual monitoring system that passively observes moving objects in a site and learns patterns of activity from those observations. For extended sites, the system will require multiple cameras. Thus, key elements of the system are motion tracking, camera coordination, activity classification, and event detection. In this paper, we focus on motion tracking and show how one can use observed motion to learn patterns of activity in a site. Motion segmentation is based on an adaptive background subtraction method that models each pixel as a mixture of Gaussians and uses an on-line approximation to update the model. The Gaussian distributions are then evaluated to determine which are most likely to result from a background process. This yields a stable, real-time outdoor tracker that reliably deals with lighting changes, repetitive motions from clutter, and long-term scene changes. While a tracking system is unaware of the identity of any object it tracks, the identity remains the same for the entire tracking sequence. Our system leverages this information by accumulating joint co-occurrences of the representations within a sequence. These joint cooccurrence statistics are then used to create a hierarchical binary-tree classification of the representations. This method is useful for classifying sequences, as well as individual instances of activities in a site. Index TermsÐReal-time visual tracking, adaptive background estimation, activity modeling, co-occurrence clustering, object recognition, video surveillance and monitoring (VSAM).

Abstract

Abstract-We propose a shape-based approach to curve evolution for the segmentation of medical images containing known object types. In particular, motivated by the work of Leventon, Grimson, and Faugeras [15], we derive a parametric model for an implicit representation of the segmenting curve by applying principal component analysis to a collection of signed distance representations of the training data. The parameters of this representation are then manipulated to minimize an objective function for segmentation. The resulting algorithm is able to handle multidimensional data, can deal with topological changes of the curve, is robust to noise and initial contour placements, and is computationally efficient. At the same time, it avoids the need for point correspondences during the training phase of the algorithm. We demonstrate this technique by applying it to two medical applications; two-dimensional segmentation of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and three-dimensional segmentation of prostate MRI.Index Terms-Active contours, binary image alignment, cardiac MRI segmentation, curve evolution, deformable model, distance transforms, eigenshapes, implicit shape representation, medical image segmentation, parametric shape model, principal component analysis, prostate segmentation, shape prior, statistical shape model.

No abstract

No abstract

Intensity-based classification of MR images has proven problematic, even when advanced techniques are used. Intra-scan and interscan intensity inhomogeneities are a common source of difficulty. While reported methods have had some success in correcting intra-scan inhomogeneities, such methods require supervision for the individual scan. This paper describes a new method called adaptive segmentation that uses knowledge of tissue intensity properties and intensity inhomogeneities to correct and segment MR images. Use of the EM algorithm leads to a fully automatic method that allows for more accurate segmentation of tissue types as well as better visualization of MRI data, that has proven to be effective in a study that includes more than 1000 brain scans.

Intensity-based classification of MR images has proven problematic, even when advanced techniques are used. Intra-scan and interscan intensity inhomogeneities are a common source of difficulty. While reported methods have had some success in correcting intra-scan inhomogeneities, such methods require supervision for the individual scan. This paper describes a new method called adaptive segmentation that uses knowledge of tissue intensity properties and intensity inhomogeneities to correct and segment MR images. Use of the EM algorithm leads to a fully automatic method that allows for more accurate segmentation of tissue types as well as better visualization of MRI data, that has proven to be effective in a study that includes more than 1000 brain scans.