Biomedical subjects

Djemel Ziou

Publications and source records attributed to Djemel Ziou.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Relevance feedback for CBIR: a new approach based on probabilistic feature weighting with positive and negative examples.

In content-based image retrieval, understanding the user's needs is a challenging task that requires integrating him in the process of retrieval. Relevance feedback (RF) has proven to be an effective tool for taking the user's judgement into account. In this paper, we present a new RF framework based on a feature selection algorithm that nicely combines the advantages of a probabilistic formulation with those of using both the positive example (PE) and the negative example (NE). Through interaction with the user, our algorithm learns the importance he assigns to image features, and then applies the results obtained to define similarity measures that correspond better to his judgement. The use of the NE allows images undesired by the user to be discarded, thereby improving retrieval accuracy. As for the probabilistic formulation of the problem, it presents a multitude of advantages and opens the door to more modeling possibilities that achieve a good feature selection. It makes it possible to cluster the query data into classes, choose the probability law that best models each class, model missing data, and support queries with multiple PE and/or NE classes. The basic principle of our algorithm is to assign more importance to features with a high likelihood and those which distinguish well between PE classes and NE classes. The proposed algorithm was validated separately and in image retrieval context, and the experiments show that it performs a good feature selection and contributes to improving retrieval effectiveness.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2006

A hybrid SEM algorithm for high-dimensional unsupervised learning using a finite generalized Dirichlet mixture.

This paper applies a robust statistical scheme to the problem of unsupervised learning of high-dimensional data. We develop, analyze, and apply a new finite mixture model based on a generalization of the Dirichlet distribution. The generalized Dirichlet distribution has a more general covariance structure than the Dirichlet distribution and offers high flexibility and ease of use for the approximation of both symmetric and asymmetric distributions. We show that the mathematical properties of this distribution allow high-dimensional modeling without requiring dimensionality reduction and, thus, without a loss of information. This makes the generalized Dirichlet distribution more practical and useful. We propose a hybrid stochastic expectation maximization algorithm (HSEM) to estimate the parameters of the generalized Dirichlet mixture. The algorithm is called stochastic because it contains a step in which the data elements are assigned randomly to components in order to avoid convergence to a saddle point. The adjective "hybrid" is justified by the introduction of a Newton-Raphson step. Moreover, the HSEM algorithm autonomously selects the number of components by the introduction of an agglomerative term. The performance of our method is tested by the classification of several pattern-recognition data sets. The generalized Dirichlet mixture is also applied to the problems of image restoration, image object recognition and texture image database summarization for efficient retrieval. For the texture image summarization problem, results are reported for the Vistex texture image database from the MIT Media Lab.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2006

A global approach for solving evolutive heat transfer for image denoising and inpainting.

This paper proposes an alternative to partial differential equations (PDEs) for solving problems in computer vision based on evolutive heat transfer. Traditionally, the method for solving such physics-based problems is to discretize and solve a PDE by a purely mathematical process. Instead of using the PDE, we propose to use the global heat principle and to decompose it into basic laws. We show that some of these laws admit an exact global version since they arise from conservative principles. We also show that the assumptions made about the other basic Iaws can be made wisely, taking into account knowledge about the problem and the domain. The numerical scheme is derived in a straightforward way from the modeled problem, thus providing a physical explanation for each step in the solution. The advantage of such an approach is that it minimizes the approximations made during the whole process and it modularizes it, allowing changing the application to a great number of problems. We apply the scheme to two applications: image denoising and inpainting which are modeled with heat transfer. For denoising, we propose a new approximation for the conductivity coefficient and we add thin lines to the features in order to block diffusion.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2004

Unsupervised learning of a finite mixture model based on the Dirichlet distribution and its application.

This paper presents an unsupervised algorithm for learning a finite mixture model from multivariate data. This mixture model is based on the Dirichlet distribution, which offers high flexibility for modeling data. The proposed approach for estimating the parameters of a Dirichlet mixture is based on the maximum likelihood (ML) and Fisher scoring methods. Experimental results are presented for the following applications: estimation of artificial histograms, summarization of image databases for efficient retrieval, and human skin color modeling and its application to skin detection in multimedia databases.

Algorithms↗