• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.82-88
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• 2017

Enlargement of the lateral ventricles have been identified as a surrogate marker of neurological disorders. Quantitative measure of the lateral ventricle from MRI would enable earlier and more accurate clinical diagnosis in monitoring disease progression. Even though it requires an automated or semi-automated segmentation method for objective quantification, it is difficult to define lateral ventricles due to insufficient contrast and brightness of structural imaging. In this study, we proposed a fully automated lateral ventricle segmentation method based on a graph cuts algorithm combined with atlas-based segmentation and connected component labeling. Initially, initial seeds for graph cuts were defined by atlas-based segmentation (ATS). They were adjusted by partial volume images in order to provide accurate a priori information on graph cuts. A graph cuts algorithm is to finds a global minimum of energy with minimum cut/maximum flow algorithm function on graph. In addition, connected component labeling used to remove false ventricle regions. The proposed method was validated with the well-known tools using the dice similarity index, recall and precision values. The proposed method was significantly higher dice similarity index ($0.860{\pm}0.036$, p < 0.001) and recall ($0.833{\pm}0.037$, p < 0.001) compared with other tools. Therefore, the proposed method yielded a robust and reliable segmentation result.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.23 no.7
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• pp.61-70
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• 2023

Image segmentation is a very crucial step in effective digital image processing. In the past decade, several research contributions were given related to this field. However, a general segmentation algorithm suitable for various applications is still challenging. Among several image segmentation approaches, graph-based approach has gained popularity due to its basic ability which reflects global image properties. This paper proposes a methodology to partition the image with its pixel, region and texture along with its intensity. To make segmentation faster in large images, it is processed in parallel among several CPUs. A way to achieve this is to split images into tiles that are independently processed. However, regions overlapping the tile border are split or lost when the minimum size requirements of the segmentation algorithm are not met. Here the contributions are made to segment the image on the basis of its pixel using min-cut/max-flow algorithm along with edge-based segmentation of the image. To segment on the basis of the region using a homogenous optimum cut algorithm with boundary segmentation. On the basis of texture, the object type using spectral partitioning technique is identified which also minimizes the graph cut value.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.211-230
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• 2022

In image segmentation, for the condition that objects (targets) and background in an image are intertwined or their common boundaries are vague as well as their textures are similar, and the targets in images are greatly variable, the deep learning might be difficult to use. Hence, a new method based on graph theory and guided feathering is proposed. First, it uses a guided feathering algorithm to initially separate the objects from background roughly, then, the image is separated into two different images: foreground image and background image, subsequently, the two images are segmented accurately by using the improved graph-based algorithm respectively, and finally, the two segmented images are merged together as the final segmentation result. For the graph-based new algorithm, it is improved based on MST in three main aspects: (1) the differences between the functions of intra-regional and inter-regional; (2) the function of edge weight; and (3) re-merge mechanism after segmentation in graph mapping. Compared to the traditional algorithms such as region merging, ordinary MST and thresholding, the studied algorithm has the better segmentation accuracy and effect, therefore it has the significant superiority.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.67-90
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• 2019

Accurate detection, tracking and analysis of human movement using robots and other visual surveillance systems is still a challenge. Efforts are on to make the system robust against constraints such as variation in shape, size, pose and occlusion. Traditional methods of detection used the sliding window approach which involved scanning of various sizes of windows across an image. This paper concentrates on employing a state-of-the-art, hierarchical graph based method for segmentation. It has two stages: part level segmentation for color-consistent segments and object level segmentation for category-consistent regions. The tracking phase is achieved by employing SIFT keypoint descriptor based technique in a combined matching and tracking scheme with validation phase. Localization of human region in each frame is performed by keypoints by casting votes for the center of the human detected region. As it is difficult to avoid incorrect keypoints, a consensus-based framework is used to detect voting behavior. The designed methodology is tested on the video sequences having 3 to 4 persons.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.609-618
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• 2013

This paper proposes a fast image segmentation method that gives high segmentation performance as graph-cut based methods. Graph-cut based image segmentation methods show high segmentation performance, however, the computational complexity is high to solve a computationally-intensive eigen-system. This is because solving eigen-system depends on the size of square matrix obtained from similarities between all pairs of pixels in the input image. Therefore, the proposed method uses the small-size square matrix, which is obtained from all the similarities among regions obtained by segmenting locally an image into several regions by graph-based method. Experimental results show that the proposed multi-scale image segmentation method using the algebraic multi-grid shows higher performance than existing methods.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.11
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• pp.936-946
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• 2009

A graph cuts method has recently attracted a lot of attentions for image segmentation, as it can globally minimize energy functions composed of data term that reflects how each pixel fits into prior information for each class and smoothness term that penalizes discontinuities between neighboring pixels. In previous approaches to graph cuts-based automatic image segmentation, GMM(Gaussian mixture models) is generally used, and means and covariance matrixes calculated by EM algorithm were used as prior information for each cluster. However, it is practicable only for clusters with a hyper-spherical or hyper-ellipsoidal shape, as the cluster was represented based on the covariance matrix centered on the mean. For arbitrary-shaped clusters, this paper proposes graph cuts-based image segmentation using mean shift analysis. As a prior information to estimate the data term, we use the set of mean trajectories toward each mode from initial means randomly selected in $L^*u^*{\upsilon}^*$ color space. Since the mean shift procedure requires many computational times, we transform features in continuous feature space into 3D discrete grid, and use 3D kernel based on the first moment in the grid, which are needed to move the means to modes. In the experiments, we investigate the problems of mean shift-based and normalized cuts-based image segmentation methods that are recently popular methods, and the proposed method showed better performance than previous two methods and graph cuts-based automatic image segmentation using GMM on Berkeley segmentation dataset.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.11-19
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation method of renal parenchyma on abdominal CT image using graph-cuts with shape constraint based on multi-probabilistic atlas. The proposed method consists of following three steps. First, to use the various shape information of renal parenchyma, multi-probabilistic atlas is generated by cortex-based similarity registration. Second, initial seeds for graph-cuts are extracted by maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation and renal parenchyma is segmented by graph-cuts with shape constraint. Third, to reduce alignment error of probabilistic atlas and increase segmentation accuracy, registration and segmentation are iteratively performed. To evaluate the performance of proposed method, qualitative and quantitative evaluation are performed. Experimental results show that the proposed method avoids a leakage into neighbor regions with similar intensity of renal parenchyma and shows improved segmentation accuracy.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.24 no.10
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• pp.1326-1335
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• 2021

As part of the cell division method, we proposed a method for segmenting images generated by topography microscopes through deep learning-based feature generation and graph segmentation. Hybrid vector shapes preserve the overall shape and boundary information of cells, so most cell shapes can be captured without any post-processing burden. NIH-3T3 and Hela-S3 cells have satisfactory results in cell description preservation. Compared to other deep learning methods, the proposed cell image segmentation method does not require postprocessing. It is also effective in preserving the overall morphology of cells and has shown better results in terms of cell boundary preservation.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.10
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• pp.1222-1230
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• 2015

Segmentation of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in knee MRI remains a challenging task due to its inhomogeneous signal intensity and low contrast with surrounding soft tissues. In this paper, we propose a multi-atlas-based segmentation of the ACL in knee MRI with locally-aligned probabilistic atlas (PA) in an iterative graph cuts framework. First, a novel PA generation method is proposed with global and local multi-atlas alignment by means of rigid registration. Second, with the generated PA, segmentation of the ACL is performed by maximum-aposteriori (MAP) estimation and then by graph cuts. Third, refinement of ACL segmentation is performed by improving shape prior through mask-based PA generation and iterative graph cuts. Experiments were performed with a Dice similarity coefficients of 75.0%, an average surface distance of 1.7 pixels, and a root mean squared distance of 2.7 pixels, which increased accuracy by 12.8%, 22.7%, and 22.9%, respectively, from the graph cuts with patient-specific shape constraints.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.7
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• pp.149-156
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• 2011

This paper proposes the effective edge selection algorithm for the rapid processing time and low memory usage of efficient graph-based image segmentation on mobile device. The graph-based image segmentation algorithm is to extract objects from a single image. The objects are consisting of graph edges, which are created by information of each image's pixel. The edge of graph is created by the difference of color intensity between the pixel and neighborhood pixels. The object regions are found by connecting the edges, based on color intensity and threshold value. Therefore, the number of edges decides on the processing time and amount of memory usage of graph-based image segmentation. Comparing to personal computer, the mobile device has many limitations such as processor speed and amount of memory. Additionally, the response time of application is an issue of mobile device programming. The image processing on mobile device should offer the reasonable response time, so that, the image segmentation processing on mobile should provide with the rapid processing time and low memory usage. In this paper, we demonstrate the performance of the effective edge selection algorithm, which effectively controls the edges of graph for the rapid processing time and low memory usage of graph-based image segmentation on mobile device.