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Shape is considered to be one of the most promising tools to represent and recognise an object. In this study, an effective and rigorous shape matching algorithm is developed based on a new descriptor and relaxation labelling technique. For each contour point, the descriptor captures the distribution of all points within the shape region along the vector perpendicular to that from the centroid to the point. In addition to stable affine invariance, the descriptor is robust to noise since it makes use of all points in the shape region. The descriptor distance is used to initialise the contour point matching probability, and relaxation labelling technique is utilised to update the matching probability using a new compatibility coefficient function, which is defined based on the shape projection preserving characteristic. The experiments on synthetic and real remote sensing data are provided to test the performance of the authors’ proposed algorithm. Compared to other four state‐of‐the‐art contour‐based shape matching algorithms, their algorithm is more robust and capable of shape matching under affine transformations and noise.

A sketch map represents an individual’s perception of a specific location. However, the information in sketch maps is often distorted and incomplete. Nevertheless, the main roads of a given location often exhibit considerable similarities between the sketch maps and metric maps. In this work, a shape-based approach was outlined to align roads in the sketch maps and metric maps. Specifically, the shapes of main roads were compared and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in three levels pertaining to an individual road, composite road, and road scene. An experiment was performed in which for eight out of nine maps sketched by our participants, accurate road maps could be obtained automatically taking as input the sketch and the metric map. The experimental results indicate that accurate matches can be obtained when the proposed road alignment approach Shape-based Spatial-Query-by-Sketch (SSQbS) is applied to incomplete or distorted roads present in sketch maps and even to roads with an inconsistent spatial relationship with the roads in the metric maps. Moreover, highly similar matches can be obtained for sketches involving fewer roads.

In this paper a shape matching algorithm for multiple component objects has been proposed which aims at matching shapes by a two-stage method. The first stage extracts the similarity features of each component using a generic shape representation model. The first stage of our shape matching method normalizes the components for orientation and scaling, and neglects minor deformations. In the second stage, the extracted similarity features of the components are combined with their relative spatial characteristics for shape matching. Some important application areas for the proposed multi-component shape matching are medical image registration, content based medical image retrieval systems, and matching articulated objects which rely on the a-priori information of the model being searched. In these applications, salient features such as vertebrae or rib cage bones can be easily segmented and used. These features however, show differences from person to person on one hand and similarities at different cross-sectional images of the same examination on the other hand. The proposed method has been tested on articulated objects, and reliable registration of 3-dimensional abdominal computed tomography images.

Shape representation and matching is one of the fundamental problems in compute vision. In this paper, we propose a novel shape contour descriptor, called curvature salience descriptor (CSD), for full shape matching. The presented descriptor utilizes only the most representative information to globally describe shape contour and is invariant to translation, rotation, scaling and partial occlusion of shapes. Shape matching is performed using the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to establish the point-to-point correspondence. To the solution of partial shape matching, we slightly modify the descriptor and develop a new matching framework that can establish the correspondence between the open query and candidate from coarse to fine. Different from previous methods, a coarse matching process is implemented to fast reject the false candidates before we establish the point-to-point correspondence. We conduct the experiments on the public datasets but also in the context of some specific applications and the results demonstrate that the proposed technique can achieve favorable performance compared to the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Image & Graphics is the property of Editorial Office of Journal of Image & Graphics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents a new numerical method for facial reconstruction. The problem is the following: given a dry skull, reconstruct a virtual face that would help in the identification of the subject. The approach combines classical features as the use of a skulls/faces database and more original aspects: (1) an original shape matching method is used to link the unknown skull to the database templates; (2) the final face is seen as an elastic 3D mask that is deformed and adapted onto the unknown skull. In this method, the skull is considered as a whole surface and not restricted to some anatomical landmarks, allowing a dense description of the skull/face relationship. Also, the approach is fully automated. Various results are presented to show its efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of minimizing the RMS distance (sum of squared distances between pairs of points) under translation between two point sets A and B, in the plane, with m=|B|≪n=|A|, in the partial-matching setup, in which each point in B is matched to a distinct point in A. Although the problem is not known to be polynomial, we establish several structural properties of the underlying subdivision DB,A of the plane and derive improved bounds on its complexity. Specifically, we show that this complexity is O(n2m3.5(elnm+e)m), so it is only quadratic in |A|. These results lead to the best known algorithm for finding a translation for which the partial-matching RMS distance between the point sets is minimized. In addition, we show how to compute a local minimum of the partial-matching RMS distance under translation, in polynomial time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Image & Graphics is the property of Editorial Office of Journal of Image & Graphics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Finding similar points in globally or locally similar shapes has been studied extensively through the use of various point descriptors or shape-matching methods. However, little work exists on finding similar points in dissimilar shapes. In this paper, we present the results of a study where users were given two dissimilar two-dimensional shapes and asked to map a given point in the first shape to the point in the second shape they consider most similar. We find that user mappings in this study correlate strongly with simple geometric relationships between points and shapes. To predict the probability distribution of user mappings between any pair of simple two-dimensional shapes, two distinct statistical models are defined using these relationships. We perform a thorough validation of the accuracy of these predictions and compare our models qualitatively and quantitatively to well-known shape-matching methods. Using our predictive models, we propose an approach to map objects or procedural content between different shapes in different design scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a deformation based representation space for curved shapes in \mathbb R^n . Given an ordered set of points sampled from a curved shape, the proposed method represents the set as an element of a finite dimensional matrix Lie group. Variation due to scale and location are filtered in a preprocessing stage, while shapes that vary only in rotation are identified by an equivalence relationship. The use of a finite dimensional matrix Lie group leads to a similarity metric with an explicit geodesic solution. Subsequently, we discuss some of the properties of the metric and its relationship with a deformation by least action. Furthermore, invariance to reparametrization or estimation of point correspondence between shapes is formulated as an estimation of sampling function. Thereafter, two possible approaches are presented to solve the point correspondence estimation problem. Finally, we propose an adaptation of k-means clustering for shape analysis in the proposed representation space. Experimental results show that the proposed representation is robust to uninformative cues, e.g., local shape perturbation and displacement. In comparison to state of the art methods, it achieves a high precision on the Swedish and the Flavia leaf datasets and a comparable result on MPEG-7, Kimia99 and Kimia216 datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Image-guidance systems have the potential to aid in laparoscopic interventions by providing sub-surface structure information and tumour localisation. The registration of a preoperative 3D image with the intraoperative laparoscopic video feed is an important component of image guidance, which should be fast, robust and cause minimal disruption to the surgical procedure. Most methods for rigid and non-rigid registration require a good initial alignment. However, in most research systems for abdominal surgery, the user has to manually rotate and translate the models, which is usually difficult to perform quickly and intuitively.Methods: We propose a fast, global method for the initial rigid alignment between a 3D mesh derived from a preoperative CT of the liver and a surface reconstruction of the intraoperative scene. We formulate the shape matching problem as a quadratic assignment problem which minimises the dissimilarity between feature descriptors while enforcing geometrical consistency between all the feature points. We incorporate a novel constraint based on the liver contours which deals specifically with the challenges introduced by laparoscopic data.Results: We validate our proposed method on synthetic data, on a liver phantom and on retrospective clinical data acquired during a laparoscopic liver resection. We show robustness over reduced partial size and increasing levels of deformation. Our results on the phantom and on the real data show good initial alignment, which can successfully converge to the correct position using fine alignment techniques. Furthermore, since we can pre-process the CT scan before surgery, the proposed method runs faster than current algorithms.Conclusion: The proposed shape matching method can provide a fast, global initial registration, which can be further refined by fine alignment methods. This approach will lead to a more usable and intuitive image-guidance system for laparoscopic liver surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shape matching plays an important role in various computer vision and graphics applications such as shape retrieval, object detection, image editing, image retrieval, etc. However, detecting shapes in cluttered images is still quite challenging due to the incomplete edges and changing perspective. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that can efficiently identify a queried shape in a cluttered image. The core idea is to acquire the transformation from the queried shape to the cluttered image by summarising all point-to-point transformations between the queried shape and the image. To do so, we adopt a point-based shape descriptor, the pyramid of arc-length descriptor (PAD), to identify point pairs between the queried shape and the image having similar local shapes. We further calculate the transformations between the identified point pairs based on PAD. Finally, we summarise all transformations in a 4D transformation histogram and search for the main cluster. Our method can handle both closed shapes and open curves, and is resistant to partial occlusions. Experiments show that our method can robustly detect shapes in images in the presence of partial occlusions, fragile edges, and cluttered backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an algorithm that computes the one-sided Hausdorff distance from a triangle mesh to a quad mesh. Our algorithm is much more robust than previous ones in the sense that memory requirement is vastly reduced, by avoiding storing combinatorial pairs of each two input model's parts. Meanwhile, point projection via uniform grid greatly accelerates the algorithm. Experimental results show that even for cases where the Hausdorff distance is near zero, its precise computation is done in an interactive speed, while memory consumption is easily manageable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matching deformable objects using their shapes are an important problem in computer vision since shape is perhaps the most distinguishable characteristic of an object. The problem is difficult due to many factors such as intra-class variations, local deformations, articulations, viewpoint changes and missed and extraneous contour portions due to errors in shape extraction. While small local deformations have been handled in the literature by allowing some leeway in the matching of individual contour points via methods such as Chamfer distance and Hausdorff distance, handling more severe deformations and articulations has been done by applying local geometric corrections such as similarity or affine. However, determining which portions of the shape should be used for the geometric corrections is very hard, although some methods have been tried. In this paper, we address this problem by an efficient search for the group of contour segments to be clustered together for a geometric correction using dynamic programming by essentially searching for the segmentations of two shapes that lead to the best matching between them. At the same time, we allow portions of the contours to remain unmatched to handle missing and extraneous contour portions. Experiments indicate that our method outperforms other algorithms, especially when the shapes to be matched are more complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel seamless video composition method based on shape matching and Poisson equation. Video composition method consists of video segmentation process and video blending process. In the video segmentation process, the user first sets a trimap for the first frame, and then performs a grab-cut algorithm. Next, considering that the performance of video segmentation may be reduced if the color, brightness and texture of the object and the background are similar, the object region segmented in the current frame is corrected through shape matching between the objects of the current frame and the previous frame. In the video blending process, the object of source video and the background of target video are blended seamlessly using Poisson equation, and the object is located according to the movement path set by the user. Simulation results show that the proposed method has better performance not only in the naturalness of the composite video but also in computational time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual shape matching has been a hot research topic. As a relatively new branch, atomic potential matching (APM) model is inspired by potential field attractions. Compared to the conventional edge potential function (EPF) model, APM has been verified to be less sensitive to intricate backgrounds in the test image and far more cost-effective in the computation process. The optimization process of shape matching can be regarded as a numerical optimization problem, which is disposed by flower pollination algorithm (FPA). This study comprehensively investigates the convergence performances of FPA and the other algorithms in shape matching problem based on APM model. Experimental results of three realistic examples show that FPA is able to provide very competitive results and to outperform the other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Escher transmutation is a graphic art that smoothly transforms one tile pattern into another tile pattern with dual perception. A classic example is the artwork called Sky and Water, in which a compelling figure-ground arrangement is applied to portray the transmutation of a bird in sky and a fish in water. The shape of a bird is progressively deformed and dissolves into the background while the background gradually reveals the shape of a fish. This paper introduces a system to create a variety of Escher-like transmutations, which includes the algorithms for initializing a tile pattern with dual figure-ground arrangement, for searching for the best matched shape of a user-specified motif from a database, and for transforming the content and shapes of tile patterns using a content-aware warping technique. The proposed system, integrating the graphic techniques of tile initialization, shape matching, and shape warping, allows users to create various Escher-like transmutations with minimal user interaction. Experimental results and conducted user studies demonstrate the feasibility and flexibility of the proposed system in Escher art generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Image & Graphics is the property of Editorial Office of Journal of Image & Graphics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)