Image segmentation is an important phase in the image recognition system. In medical imaging such as blood cell analysis, it becomes a crucial step in quantitative cytophotometry. Currently, blood cell images become predominantly valuable in medical diagnostics tools. In this paper, we present an adaptive hybrid analysis based on selected segmentation algorithms. Three designates common approaches, that are Fuzzy c-means, K-means and Mean-shift are adapted. Blood cell images that are infected with malaria parasites at various stages were tested. The most suitable method will be selected based on the lowest number of regions. The selected approach will be enhanced by applying Median-cut algorithm to further expand the segmentation process. The proposed adaptive hybrid method has shown a significant improvement in the number of regions.

Image segmentation is an important phase in image recognition system. In medical imaging such as blood cell analysis, it becomes a crucial step in quantitative cytophotometry. Currently, blood cell images become predominantly valuable in medical diagnostics tools. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis on several segmentation algorithms. Three selected common approaches, that are Fuzzy c-means, K-means and Mean-shift were presented. Blood cell images that are infected with malaria parasites at various stages were tested. The most suitable method that is K-means was selected. K-means has been enhanced by integrating Median-cut algorithm to further improve the segmentation process. The proposed integrated method has shown a significant improvement in the number of selected regions.

Motion segmentation is a fundamental step for vehicle detection especially in urban traffic surveillance systems. Temporal frame differencing is the simplest and fastest technique that is used to identify foreground moving vehicles from static background scene. Conventional techniques utilize background modelling and subtraction, which involves poor adaptation under slow or temporarily stopped vehicles. To address this problems cumulative frame differencing (CFD) is proposed. Dynamic threshold value based on the standard deviation of CFD is used to estimate global variance of the motion accumulated variations of pixel intensity. The tests of the proposed technique achieve robust and accurate vehicle segmentation, which improves detection of slow motion, temporary and long term stopped vehicles, moreover, it enables the real-time capability.

Many factors, such as noise level in the original image and the noise-removal methods that clean the image prior to performing a vectorization, may play an important role in affecting the line detection of raster-to-vector conversion methods. In this paper, we propose an empirical performance evaluation methodology that is coupled with a robust statistical analysis method to study many factors that may affect the quality of line detection. Three factors are studied: noise level, noise-removal method, and the raster-to-vector conversion method. Eleven mechanical engineering drawings, three salt-and-pepper noise levels, six noise-removal methods, and three commercial vectorization methods were used in the experiment. The Vector Recovery Index (VRI) of the detected vectors was the criterion used for the quality of line detection. A repeated measure ANOVA analyzed the VRI scores. The statistical analysis shows that all the studied factors affected the quality of line detection. It also shows that two-way interactions between the studied factors affected line detection.

Underwater images are affected by reduced contrast and non-uniform colour cast due to the absorption and scattering of light in the aquatic environment. This affects the quality and reliability of image processing and therefore colour correction is a necessary pre-processing stage. In this paper, we propose an Unsupervised Colour Correction Method (UCM) for underwater image enhancement. UCM is based on colour balancing, contrast correction of RGB colour model and contrast correction of HSI colour model. Firstly, the colour cast is reduced by equalizing the colour values. Secondly, an enhancement to a contrast correction method is applied to increase the Red colour by stretching red histogram towards the maximum (i.e., right side), similarly the Blue colour is reduced by stretching the blue histogram towards the minimum (i.e., left side). Thirdly, the Saturation and Intensity components of the HSI colour model have been applied for contrast correction to increase the true colour using Saturation and to address the illumination problem through Intensity. We compare our results with three well known methods, namely Gray World, White Patch and Histogram Equalisation using Adobe Photoshop. The proposed method has produced better results than the existing methods.

Outdoor machine vision is getting a concern nowadays. Ranging from surveillance and monitoring system to automotive system such as driver assistance system require vision application or artificial eye to keep monitoring the situations. However, most of these applications works very well during clear weather and degrade during bad weather due to the atmospheric particles mitigate the quality of vision system. This paper discuss the state of the art of image enhancement techniques used to adjust the contrast of an outdoor image degrade by fog, haze, and rain. A brief overview of bad weather will be discussed and several recent techniques on removing fog, haze and rain are discussed.

Clustering is one of the most common automated image segmentation techniques used in many fields including machine learning, pattern recognition, image processing, and bioinformatics. Recently many scientists have performed tremendous research in helping the hematologists in the issue of segmenting the blood cells in the early of prognosis. This paper aims to segment the blood cell images of patients suffering from acute leukemia using an adaptive K-Means clustering together with mean shift algorithm. The integrated clustering techniques have produced comprehensive output images with minimal filtering process to remove the background scene.

Outdoor images that are captured in bad weather conditions have low contrast and infidelity colours. Under the turbid medium conditions such as haze, mist, fog and drizzle, the light which reaches to the sensor is attenuated by atmospheric particles. These atmospheric phenomena degrade the contrast intensity of outdoor images based on haze density. In this research, we present new method to improve both the intensity and fine details of outdoor scene images. The RGB (Red, Green and Blue) input image is converted to the HSI (Hue Saturation Intensity) colour space and the density of the haze is estimated. Then, we use Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) technique to enhance the degraded intensity based on the estimation of the density of the haze. Our method is effective in a wide range of weather conditions and under different levels of visibility.

The haze phenomenon exerts a degrading effect that decreases contrast and causes colour shifts in outdoor images. The presence of haze in digital images is bothersome, unpleasant, and, occasionally, even dangerous. The atmospheric light scattering (ALS) model is widely used to restore hazy images. In this model, two unknown parameters should be estimated: airlight and scene transmission, The quality of dehazed images depends considerably on the accuracy of both estimates. Classic methods typically determine airlight based on the brightest pixels in an image. However, in the traffic scene context, this estimate is compromised when other light sources, such as vehicle headlights from the opposite direction, are present. Transmission estimation is usually more complicated. Hence, the complexity of the overall dehazing process is dependent on this estimate. To address this issue, this study proposes a framework for constant-time airlight and linear transmission estimation. This framework consists of two methods: airlight by image integrals (ALII), which is utilized to estimate the airlight value in real time with high accuracy, and bounded transmission (BT), which is proposed for the linear and simplified estimation of transmission maps. To evaluate the proposed framework, three image datasets are used: (1) seven images that are gathered from the works of existing methods (called the global dataset); (2) the synthetic foggy road image database (FRIDA), which is a synthetically generated dataset for simulating different bad weather conditions; and (3) a dataset of images that were extracted from videos in Malaysia (IV-M), which consists of images that were extracted from traffic video sequences, which were captured in various weather conditions from 2014 to 2016 in Malaysia. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is at least seven times faster than existing methods. In addition, the ANOVA test proves that the quality of the dehazed images is statistically similar to or better than the image quality that was achieved using existing methods. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Rain, fog and haze are natural phenomena that fade scenes, limit the visibility range, and cause shifts in colors. These phenomena also play a decisive role in determining the degree of reliability of many kinds of outdoor applications, such as aerial and satellite imaging, surveillance, and driver assistance systems. Thus, removing their effects from images/videos is very crucial. Due to its mathematically ill posed nature, enhancement process of rain, fog, and haze plagued images/videos is highly challenging. In this paper, we propose a fast yet robust technique to enhance the visibility of video frames using the dark channel prior combined with fuzzy logic-based technique. The dark channel prior is a statistical regularity of outdoor haze-free images based on the observation that most local patches in the haze-free images contain pixels which are dark in at least one color channel, where the fuzzy logic-based technique is used to map an input space to an output space using a collection of fuzzy membership functions and rules to decide softly in case of uncertainties. The combination of the dark channel and the fuzzy logic-based technique will produce high quality haze-free images in real-time. Furthermore, it will be combined with rules derived from the stable atmospheric scattering model and will yield a fast yet high quality enhancement results.

Enhancing images that are plagued with weather related conditions; such as haze, fog and rain poses a challenging problem due to its ill-posed nature, which means the unknowns that need to be found are more than the equations that we have. To address such challenges, a fast yet robust method is proposed in this paper where unknowns in the light scattering model are estimated based on physically sound assumptions. Light scattering model describes the formation of those phenomena in an image as a combination of airlight and the original scene, where this combination is controlled by how much transmission value present at the scene's point. The transmission value determines how much of the original scene's intensity were attenuated and how much airlight was added. The attenuation term of the light scattering model causes the reduction in contrast and the airlight term causes the effect of color shift. In this paper, Intensity Deterioration Ratio (IDR) and Saturation Deterioration Ratio (SDR) are proposed, where the former can be used to estimate the reduction of contrast and so gives a clue about the attenuation term, and the latter to estimate the reduction of chromaticity in a scene which gives a clue about the airlight term. IDR and SDR are therefore used to give us a new insight in using the light scattering model when enhancing images.