A new hybrid model of convolutional neural networks and hidden Markov chains for image classification.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have lately proven to be extremely effective in image recognition. Besides CNN, hidden Markov chains (HMCs) are probabilistic models widely used in image processing. This paper presents a new hybrid model composed of both CNNs and HMCs. The CNN model is used for feature extraction and dimensionality reduction and the HMC model for classification. In the new model, named CNN-HMC, convolutional and pooling layers of the CNN model are applied to extract features maps. Also a Peano scan is applied to obtain several HMCs. Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate HMC's parameters and to make the Bayesian Maximum Posterior Mode (MPM) classification method used unsupervised. The objective is to enhance the performances of the CNN models for the image classification task. To evaluate the performance of our proposal, it is compared to six models in two series of experiments. In the first series, we consider two CNN-HMC and compare them to two CNNs, 4Conv and Mini AlexNet, respectively. The results show that CNN-HMC model outperforms the classical CNN model, and significantly improves the accuracy of the Mini AlexNet. In the second series, it is compared to four models CNN-SVMs, CNN-LSTMs, CNN-RFs, and CNN-gcForests, which only differ from CNN-HMC by the second classification step. Based on five datasets and four metrics recall, precision, F1-score, and accuracy, results of these comparisons show again the interest of the proposed CNN-HMC. In particular, with a CNN model of 71% of accuracy, the CNN-HMC gives an accuracy ranging between 81.63% and 92.5%.

Lower Limb Locomotion Activity Recognition of Healthy Individuals Using Semi-Markov Model and Single Wearable Inertial Sensor.

Lower limb locomotion activity is of great interest in the field of human activity recognition. In this work, a triplet semi-Markov model-based method is proposed to recognize the locomotion activities of healthy individuals when lower limbs move periodically. In the proposed algorithm, the gait phases (or leg phases) are introduced into the hidden states, and Gaussian mixture density is introduced to represent the complex conditioned observation density. The introduced sojourn state forms the semi-Markov structure, which naturally replicates the real transition of activity and gait during motion. Then, batch mode and on-line Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms are proposed, respectively, for model training and adaptive on-line recognition. The algorithm is tested on two datasets collected from wearable inertial sensors. The batch mode recognition accuracy reaches up to 95.16%, whereas the adaptive on-line recognition gradually obtains high accuracy after the time required for model updating. Experimental results show an improvement in performance compared to the other competitive algorithms.

A framework based on hidden Markov trees for multimodal PET/CT image co-segmentation.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of a probabilistic quad-tree graph (hidden Markov tree, HMT) to provide fast computation, robustness and an interpretational framework for multimodality image processing and to evaluate this framework for single gross tumor target (GTV) delineation from both positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) images. METHODS: We exploited joint statistical dependencies between hidden states to handle the data stack using multi-observation, multi-resolution of HMT and Bayesian inference. This framework was applied to segmentation of lung tumors in PET/CT datasets taking into consideration simultaneously the CT and the PET image information. PET and CT images were considered using either the original voxels intensities, or after wavelet/contourlet enhancement. The Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), sensitivity (SE), positive predictive value (PPV) were used to assess the performance of the proposed approach on one simulated and 15 clinical PET/CT datasets of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cases. The surrogate of truth was a statistical consensus (obtained with the Simultaneous Truth and Performance Level Estimation algorithm) of three manual delineations performed by experts on fused PET/CT images. The proposed framework was applied to PET-only, CT-only and PET/CT datasets, and were compared to standard and improved fuzzy c-means (FCM) multimodal implementations. RESULTS: A high agreement with the consensus of manual delineations was observed when using both PET and CT images. Contourlet-based HMT led to the best results with a DSC of 0.92 ± 0.11 compared to 0.89 ± 0.13 and 0.90 ± 0.12 for Intensity-based HMT and Wavelet-based HMT, respectively. Considering PET or CT only in the HMT led to much lower accuracy. Standard and improved FCM led to comparatively lower accuracy than HMT, even when considering multimodal implementations. CONCLUSIONS: We evaluated the accuracy of the proposed HMT-based framework for PET/CT image segmentation. The proposed method reached good accuracy, especially with pre-processing in the contourlet domain.

Phasic Triplet Markov Chains.

Hidden Markov chains have been shown to be inadequate for data modeling under some complex conditions. In this work, we address the problem of statistical modeling of phenomena involving two heterogeneous system states. Such phenomena may arise in biology or communications, among other fields. Namely, we consider that a sequence of meaningful words is to be searched within a whole observation that also contains arbitrary one-by-one symbols. Moreover, a word may be interrupted at some site to be carried on later. Applying plain hidden Markov chains to such data, while ignoring their specificity, yields unsatisfactory results. The Phasic triplet Markov chain, proposed in this paper, overcomes this difficulty by means of an auxiliary underlying process in accordance with the triplet Markov chains theory. Related Bayesian restoration techniques and parameters estimation procedures according to the new model are then described. Finally, to assess the performance of the proposed model against the conventional hidden Markov chain model, experiments are conducted on synthetic and real data.

Unsupervised statistical segmentation of nonstationary images using triplet Markov fields.

Recent developments in statistical theory and associated computational techniques have opened new avenues for image modeling as well as for image segmentation techniques. Thus, a host of models have been proposed and the ones which have probably received considerable attention are the hidden Markov fields (HMF) models. This is due to their simplicity of handling and their potential for providing improved image quality. Although these models provide satisfying results in the stationary case, they can fail in the nonstationary one. In this paper, we tackle the problem of modeling a nonstationary hidden random field and its effect on the unsupervised statistical image segmentation. We propose an original approach, based on the recent triplet Markov field (TMF) model, which enables one to deal with nonstationary class fields. Moreover, the noise can be correlated and possibly non-Gaussian. An original parameter estimation method which uses the Pearson system to find the natures of the noise margins, which can vary with the class, is also proposed and used to perform unsupervised segmentation of such images. Experiments indicate that the new model and related processing algorithm can improve the results obtained with the classical ones.