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Abstract: Motivation: Physical properties of coal such as particle size distribution have a large influence on the stability and operational behavior of fluidized bed reactors and metallurgical furnaces. In particular, the presence of large amounts of “fine” particles invariably has a drastic effect on plant performance as a result of impaired gas permeability characteristics of the coal or ore burden. Therefore, monitoring and control of particle size distribution profiles of such aggregate material on reactor feed streams, such as moving conveyor belts, is critical for predictable operation of these processes. Traditionally, the method of sieve analysis using stock or belt cut samples has been widely used in industry. Unfortunately, the reliability and usefulness of belt cut techniques are constrained by frequency of sampling as well as laboratory analysis turnaround times. For real-time monitoring and control purposes, automated sampling and analysis methods are more desirable. Methods: In this study, the problem of estimating the particle size distribution profile of material on a moving conveyor belt is formulated within a texture classification framework, which has its basis in machine vision and incorporates elements from statistical pattern recognition. Using exemplar images of coal particles taken on a process stream, a set of local features that compactly describes the textural properties of each image are expressed in terms of localized nonlinear features called textons. Representation of image information using textons is primarily motivated by insights from neuroscience research on the optimality of linear oriented basis functions as models of perception in early processing of visual information in the cortex regions of the human brain. Using these representations for different textures, nearest neighbor and support vector machine classification models are subsequently used to classify test images. Results: Using a comprehensive evaluation, it is shown that the use of texton representation obtained from decomposing images with linear oriented basis functions can be sufficiently discriminative compared to the use of the widely used second-order statistical features or features from other baseline models. In particular, model performance obtained with appropriately tuned filters suggest the importance of including shape and spatial structure information in an image representation for texture classification of coal particles. Furthermore, using nonlinear support vector machines rather than nearest neighbor classifiers significantly improved classification performance. A texture classification approach to particle size profile estimation has potential applications in the online monitoring of the proportion of “fines” in coal material on moving conveyor belts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by cognitive and behavioral impairment that significantly interferes with social and occupational functioning. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a relatively broad clinical condition involving a slight memory deficit, which in many cases represents a transitional state between a cognitively normal (CN) condition and AD. Structural magnetic resonance (sMR) imaging has been widely used in studies related to AD because it provides images with excellent anatomical details and information about structural and contrast changes induced by the disease in the brain. Many published studies restrict their analysis to a few particular regions of the brain and search for structural changes caused by the disease. Recent studies start looking for new AD biomarkers using multiple brain regions and focusing on subtle texture changes in the image. Therefore, this study proposes a new technique for MR image classification in AD diagnosis using graph kernels constructed from texture features extracted from sMR images. In our method, we first segment the MR brain images into multiple regions with the FreeSurfer. Then, we extract 22 texture features using three methods and define the graph-node attributes as the probability distributions of the extracted features. Next, for each texture feature, we build a graph and define its edge weights as the distances between pairs of node attributes using three distance metrics. After that, we use a threshold-based approach for graph edges removal and create the graph-kernels matrices. Finally, we perform image classification using Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with two graph-kernels. Results of our method have shown better performances for the CN × AD (AUC = 0.92) and CN × MCI (AUC = 0.81) classifications, and worse for the MCI × AD case (AUC = 0.78). This trend is consistent with other published results and makes sense if we consider the concept of Alzheimer's disease continuum from pathophysiological, biomarker and clinical perspectives. Besides allowing the use of different texture attributes for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's, our method uses the graph-kernel approach to represent texture features from different regions of the brain image, which considerably facilitates the image classification task via SVMs. Our results were promising when compared to the state-of-the-art in graph-based AD classification. • Alzheimer's disease classification based on graph kernel Support Vector Machines. • Evaluation of image texture patterns of multiple brain regions in Alzheimer. • Assessment of three distance metrics to measure node attributes differences. • Threshold based method for graph edge removal to obtain discriminative graphs. • Classification results comparable to other proposed graph-based models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the effects that different preprocessing techniques have on the performance of features extracted from Haralick's co-occurrence matrix, one of the best known methods for analyzing image texture. In addition, we compare and combine different strategies for extracting descriptors from the co-occurrence matrix. We propose an ensemble of different preprocessing methods, where, for each descriptor, a given Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is trained. The set of classifiers is then combined by weighted sum rule. The best result is obtained by combining the extracted descriptors using the following preprocessing methods: wavelet decomposition, local phase quantization, orientation, and the Weber law descriptor. Texture descriptors are extracted from the entire co-occurrence matrix, as well as from sub-windows, and evaluated at multiple scales. We validate our approach on eleven image datasets representing different image classification problems using the Wilcoxon signed rank test. Results show that our approach improves the performance of standard methods. All source code for the approaches tested in this paper will be available at: https://www.dei.unipd.it/node/2357 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpretation of long-term Electroencephalography (EEG) records is a tiresome task for clinicians. This paper presents an efficient, low cost and novel approach for patient-specific classification of long-term epileptic EEG records. We aim to achieve this with the minimum supervision from the neurologist. To accomplish this objective, first a novel feature extraction method is proposed based on the mapping of EEG signals into two dimensional space, resulting into a texture image. The texture image is constructed by mapping and scaling EEG signals and their associated frequency sub-bands into the gray-level image domain. Image texture analysis using gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) is then applied in order to extract multivariate features which are able to differentiate between seizure and seizure-free events. To evaluate the discriminative power of the proposed feature extraction method, a comparative study is performed, against other dedicated feature extraction methods. The comparative performance evaluations show that the proposed feature extraction method can outperform other state-of-art feature extraction methods with a low computational cost. With a training rate of 25%, the overall sensitivity of 70.19% and specificity of 97.74% are achieved in the classification of over 163 h of EEG records using support vector machine (SVM) classifiers with linear kernels and trained by the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]