There is a need for automatic systems that can reliably detect, track and classify fish and other marine species in underwater videos without human intervention. Conventional computer vision techniques do not perform well in underwater conditions where the background is complex and the shape and textural features of fish are subtle. Data-driven classification models like neural networks require a huge amount of labelled data, otherwise they tend to over-fit to the training data and fail on unseen test data which is not involved in training. We present a state-of-the-art computer vision method for fine-grained fish species classification based on deep learning techniques. A cross-layer pooling algorithm using a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network as a generalized feature detector is proposed, thus avoiding the need for a large amount of training data. Classification on test data is performed by a SVM on the features computed through the proposed method, resulting in classification accuracy of 94.3% for fish species from typical underwater video imagery captured off the coast of Western Australia. This research advocates that the development of automated classification systems which can identify fish from underwater video imagery is feasible and a cost-effective alternative to manual identification by humans.

No abstract

Background With the advancement of powerful image processing and machine learning techniques, Computer Aided Diagnosis has become ever more prevalent in all fields of medicine including ophthalmology. These methods continue to provide reliable and standardized large scale screening of various image modalities to assist clinicians in identifying diseases. Since optic disc is the most important part of retinal fundus image for glaucoma detection, this paper proposes a two-stage framework that first detects and localizes optic disc and then classifies it into healthy or glaucomatous. Methods The first stage is based on Regions with Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) and is responsible for localizing and extracting optic disc from a retinal fundus image while the second stage uses Deep Convolutional Neural Network to classify the extracted disc into healthy or glaucomatous. Unfortunately, none of the publicly available retinal fundus image datasets provides any bounding box ground truth required for disc localization. Therefore, in addition to the proposed solution, we also developed a rule-based semi-automatic ground truth generation method that provides necessary annotations for training RCNN based model for automated disc localization. Results The proposed method is evaluated on seven publicly available datasets for disc localization and on ORIGA dataset, which is the largest publicly available dataset with healthy and glaucoma labels, for glaucoma classification. The results of automatic localization mark new state-of-the-art on six datasets with accuracy reaching 100% on four of them. For glaucoma classification we achieved Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve equal to 0.874 which is 2.7% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art results previously obtained for classification on ORIGA dataset. Conclusion Once trained on carefully annotated data, Deep Learning based methods for optic disc detection and localization are not only robust, accurate and fully automated but also eliminates the need for dataset-dependent heuristic algorithms. Our empirical evaluation of glaucoma classification on ORIGA reveals that reporting only Area Under the Curve, for datasets with class imbalance and without pre-defined train and test splits, does not portray true picture of the classifier’s performance and calls for additional performance metrics to substantiate the results.

No abstract

Handwritten signatures are biometric traits at the center of debate in the scientific community. Over the last 40 years, the interest in signature studies has grown steadily, having as its main reference the application of automatic signature verification, as previously published reviews in 1989, 2000, and 2008 bear witness. Ever since, and over the last 10 years, the application of handwritten signature technology has strongly evolved and much research has focused on the possibility of applying systems based on handwritten signature analysis and processing to a multitude of new fields. After several years of haphazard growth of this research area, it is time to assess its current developments for their applicability in order to draw a structured way forward. This perspective reports a systematic review of the last 10 years of the literature on handwritten signatures with respect to the new scenario, focusing on the most promising domains of research and trying to elicit possible future research directions in this subject. CCS Concepts: • General and reference → Surveys and overviews; • Security and privacy → Biometrics; Access control; • Theory of computation → Pattern matching; • Applied computing → Document analysis; System forensics;