Showing papers by "Tony Lindeberg published in 2000"

Automatic extraction of roads from aerial images based on scale space and snakes

Abstract: . We propose a new approach for automatic road extraction from aerial imagery with a model and a strategy mainly based on the multi-scale detection of roads in combination with geometry-constrained edge extraction using snakes. A main advantage of our approach is, that it allows for the first time a bridging of shadows and partially occluded areas using the heavily disturbed evidence in the image. Additionally, it has only few parameters to be adjusted. The road network is constructed after extracting crossings with varying shape and topology. We show the feasibility of the approach not only by presenting reasonable results but also by evaluating them quantitatively based on ground truth.

Fingerprint enhancement by shape adaptation of scale-space operators with automatic scale selection

Abstract: This work presents two mechanisms for processing fingerprint images; shape-adapted smoothing based on second moment descriptors and automatic scale selection based on normalized derivatives. The shape adaptation procedure adapts the smoothing operation to the local ridge structures, which allows interrupted ridges to be joined without destroying essential singularities such as branching points and enforces continuity of their directional fields. The scale selection procedure estimates local ridge width and adapts the amount of smoothing to the local amount of noise. In addition, a ridgeness measure is defined, which reflects how well the local image structure agrees with a qualitative ridge model, and is used for spreading the results of shape adaptation into noisy areas. The combined approach makes it possible to resolve fine scale structures in clear areas while reducing the risk of enhancing noise in blurred or fragmented areas. The result is a reliable and adaptively detailed estimate of the ridge orientation field and ridge width, as well as a smoothed grey-level version of the input image. We propose that these general techniques should be of interest to developers of automatic fingerprint identification systems as well as in other applications of processing related types of imagery.

An automatic assessment scheme for steel quality inspection

Abstract: This paper presents an automatic system for steel quality assessment, by measuring textural properties of carbide distributions. In current steel inspection, specially etched and polished steel specimen surfaces are classified manually under a light microscope, by comparisons with a standard chart. This procedure is basically two-dimensional, reflecting the size of the carbide agglomerations and their directional distribution. To capture these textural properties in terms of image fea tures, we first apply a rich set of image-processing operations, including mathematical morphology, multi-channel Gabor filtering, and the computation of texture measures with automatic scale selection in linear scale-space. Then, a feature selector is applied to a 40-dimensional feature space, and a classification scheme is defined, which on a sample set of more than 400 images has classification performance values comparable to those of human metallographers. Finally, a fully automatic inspection system is designed, which actively selects the most salient carbide structure on the specimen surface for subsequent classification. The feasibility of the overall approach for future use in the production process is demonstrated by a prototype system. It is also shown how the presented classification scheme allows for the definition of a new reference chart in terms of quantitative measures.