Risk difference tests for stratified binary data under Dallal's model.

In medical studies, the binary data is often encountered when the paired organs or body parts receive treatment. However, the same treatment may lead to different therapeutic effects based on the stratified factors or confounding effects. Under Dallal's model, the paper proposes the homogeneity test of risk difference to determine the necessity of stratified treatment. When the stratification is not necessary, common test is introduced to investigate if the risk difference is equal to a fixed constant between two groups. Several statistical tests are derived to analyze homogeneity and common hypotheses, respectively. Monte Carlo simulations show that the score tests behave well in both of hypotheses. Wald-type and Rosner's statistics are always liberal but have higher empirical powers. Especially, the likelihood ratio statistic is better for the homogeneity test in the case of smaller data with larger strata. Two real examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in ankle instability and otolaryngology studies.

Statistical tests under Dallal's model: Asymptotic and exact methods.

This paper proposes asymptotic and exact methods for testing the equality of correlations for multiple bilateral data under Dallal's model. Three asymptotic test statistics are derived for large samples. Since they are not applicable to small data, several conditional and unconditional exact methods are proposed based on these three statistics. Numerical studies are conducted to compare all these methods with regard to type I error rates (TIEs) and powers. The results show that the asymptotic score test is the most robust, and two exact tests have satisfactory TIEs and powers. Some real examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of these tests.

RIFT: Multi-modal Image Matching Based on Radiation-variation Insensitive Feature Transform.

Traditional feature matching methods, such as scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), usually use image intensity or gradient information to detect and describe feature points; however, both intensity and gradient are sensitive to nonlinear radiation distortions (NRD). To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel feature matching algorithm that is robust to large NRD. The proposed method is called radiation-variation insensitive feature transform (RIFT). There are three main contributions in RIFT. First, RIFT uses phase congruency (PC) instead of image intensity for feature point detection. RIFT considers both the number and repeatability of feature points and detects both corner points and edge points on the PC map. Second, RIFT originally proposes a maximum index map (MIM) for feature description. The MIM is constructed from the log-Gabor convolution sequence and is much more robust to NRD than traditional gradient map. Thus, RIFT not only largely improves the stability of feature detection but also overcomes the limitation of gradient information for feature description. Third, RIFT analyses the inherent influence of rotations on the values of the MIM and realises rotation invariance. We use six different types of multi-modal image datasets to evaluate RIFT, including optical-optical, infrared-optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-optical, depth-optical, map-optical, and day-night datasets. Experimental results show that RIFT is superior to SIFT and SAR-SIFT on multi-modal images. To the best of our knowledge, RIFT is the first feature matching algorithm that can achieve good performance on all the abovementioned types of multi-modal images. The source code of RIFT and the multi-modal image datasets are publicly available1.

An Eight-Direction Scanning Detection Algorithm for the Mapping Robot Pathfinding in Unknown Indoor Environment.

Aiming at the problem of how to enable the mobile robot to navigate and traverse efficiently and safely in the unknown indoor environment and map the environment, an eight-direction scanning detection (eDSD) algorithm is proposed as a new pathfinding algorithm. Firstly, we use a laser-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithm to perform simultaneous localization and mapping to acquire the environment information around the robot. Then, according to the proposed algorithm, the 8 certain areas around the 8 directions which are developed from the robot's center point are analyzed in order to calculate the probabilistic path vector of each area. Considering the requirements of efficient traverse and obstacle avoidance in practical applications, the proposal can find the optimal local path in a short time. In addition to local pathfinding, the global pathfinding is also introduced for unknown environments of large-scale and complex structures to reduce the repeated traverse. The field experiments in three typical indoor environments demonstrate that deviation of the planned path from the ideal path can be kept to a low level in terms of the path length and total time consumption. It is confirmed that the proposed algorithm is highly adaptable and practical in various indoor environments.

Feature-Based Laser Scan Matching and Its Application for Indoor Mapping.

Scan matching, an approach to recover the relative position and orientation of two laser scans, is a very important technique for indoor positioning and indoor modeling. The iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm and its variants are the most well-known techniques for such a problem. However, ICP algorithms rely highly on the initial guess of the relative transformation, which will reduce its power for practical applications. In this paper, an initial-free 2D laser scan matching method based on point and line features is proposed. We carefully design a framework for the detection of point and line feature correspondences. First, distinct feature points are detected based on an extended 1D SIFT, and line features are extracted via a modified Split-and-Merge algorithm. In this stage, we also give an effective strategy for discarding unreliable features. The point and line features are then described by a distance histogram; the pairs achieving best matching scores are accepted as potential correct correspondences. The histogram cluster technique is adapted to filter outliers and provide an accurate initial value of the rigid transformation. We also proposed a new relative pose estimation method that is robust to outliers. We use the lq-norm (0 < q < 1) metric in this approach, in contrast to classic optimization methods whose cost function is based on the l2-norm of residuals. Extensive experiments on real data demonstrate that the proposed method is almost as accurate as ICPs and is initial free. We also show that our scan matching method can be integrated into a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system for indoor mapping.