DeepCrack: Learning Hierarchical Convolutional Features for Crack Detection.

Cracks are typical line structures that are of interest in many computer-vision applications. In practice, many cracks, e.g., pavement cracks, show poor continuity and low contrast, which brings great challenges to image-based crack detection by using low-level features. In this paper, we propose DeepCrack - an end-to-end trainable deep convolutional neural network for automatic crack detection by learning high-level features for crack representation. In this method, multi-scale deep convolutional features learned at hierarchical convolutional stages are fused together to capture the line structures. More detailed representations are made in larger-scale feature maps and more holistic representations are made in smaller-scale feature maps. We build DeepCrack net on the encoder-decoder architecture of SegNet, and pairwisely fuse the convolutional features generated in the encoder network and in the decoder network at the same scale. We train DeepCrack net on one crack dataset and evaluate it on three others. The experimental results demonstrate that DeepCrack achieves F-Measure over 0.87 on the three challenging datasets in average and outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.

HEp-2 Cell Classification via Combining Multiresolution Co-Occurrence Texture and Large Region Shape Information.

Indirect immunofluorescence imaging of human epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cell image is an effective evidence to diagnose autoimmune diseases. Recently, computer-aided diagnosis of autoimmune diseases by the HEp-2 cell classification has attracted great attention. However, the HEp-2 cell classification task is quite challenging due to large intraclass and small interclass variations. In this paper, we propose an effective approach for the automatic HEp-2 cell classification by combining multiresolution co-occurrence texture and large regional shape information. To be more specific, we propose to: 1) capture multiresolution co-occurrence texture information by a novel pairwise rotation-invariant co-occurrence of local Gabor binary pattern descriptor; 2) depict large regional shape information by using an improved Fisher vector model with RootSIFT features, which are sampled from large image patches in multiple scales; and 3) combine both features. We evaluate systematically the proposed approach on the IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2012, the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2013, and the ICPR 2014 contest datasets. The proposed method based on the combination of the introduced two features outperforms the winners of the ICPR 2012 contest using the same experimental protocol. Our method also greatly improves the winner of the ICIP 2013 contest under four different experimental setups. Using the leave-one-specimen-out evaluation strategy, our method achieves comparable performance with the winner of the ICPR 2014 contest that combined four features.

Pairwise Rotation Invariant Co-Occurrence Local Binary Pattern.

Designing effective features is a fundamental problem in computer vision. However, it is usually difficult to achieve a great tradeoff between discriminative power and robustness. Previous works shown that spatial co-occurrence can boost the discriminative power of features. However the current existing co-occurrence features are taking few considerations to the robustness and hence suffering from sensitivity to geometric and photometric variations. In this work, we study the Transform Invariance (TI) of co-occurrence features. Concretely we formally introduce a Pairwise Transform Invariance (PTI) principle, and then propose a novel Pairwise Rotation Invariant Co-occurrence Local Binary Pattern (PRICoLBP) feature, and further extend it to incorporate multi-scale, multi-orientation, and multi-channel information. Different from other LBP variants, PRICoLBP can not only capture the spatial context co-occurrence information effectively, but also possess rotation invariance. We evaluate PRICoLBP comprehensively on nine benchmark data sets from five different perspectives, e.g., encoding strategy, rotation invariance, the number of templates, speed, and discriminative power compared to other LBP variants. Furthermore we apply PRICoLBP to six different but related applications-texture, material, flower, leaf, food, and scene classification, and demonstrate that PRICoLBP is efficient, effective, and of a well-balanced tradeoff between the discriminative power and robustness.