Features

&
Object recognition and
classification
Ritu Saha
MSc 210915
Slide Outline ES
KY TUN
FUN

• Features & Example of

Feature
• Medical purposes of feature
• Object recognition &
classification
• Sample Questions

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 What does it mean by Feature?
The features are higher-level
representations of structure and
shape, and should be chosen to
preserve the information that is
important to the particular task at
hand.

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Example of Feature

• Examples of features include those

describing the contents of the objects
and those describing their shape.

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First Category
The first category includes features such as:
• Features obtainable from the histogram of an
object using region-of-interest processing, such as
the mean pixel value (grayness or color) and its
standard deviation, the contrast, and the entropy;
and

1. The texture of an object, using statistical

moments of the gray-level histogram of the
object or fractal dimension of the object.

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Second Category

The second category includes features such as

• the size or area, A, of an object, obtained directly from the

number of pixels comprising each object, and its perimeter, P
• The circularity, ;
• Robust; i.e., they should normally be invariant to translation,
orientation, scale and illumination, and well-designed features
will be at least partially invariant to the presence of noise and
artifacts; this may require some pre-processing of the image
(e.g.low-pass filtering to reduce noise, and variable
background removal and histogram equalization to ensure
illumination invariance) before measurement of the features.
.

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Second Category Contd.
• Discriminating (i.e. the range of values for objects
in different classes should be different and
preferably be well separated and non-overlapping).
• Reliable (i.e. all objects of the same class should
have similar values).
• Independent (i.e. uncorrelated; as a counter-
example, length and area are correlated
and it would be wasteful to consider both as
separate features).

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Medical uses of Feature Recognition
• For screening, i.e. detection of a disease performed on large numbers of patients with the
intent of following up suspicious findings, the features should be simple to extract, require
minimal user intervention and contribute to the sensitivity (Appendix B.3) of the procedure. Examples of
images used in screening include x-ray mammograms for breast cancer,
retinal images for eye diseases and visible or x-ray images for childhood scoliosis
(curvature of the spine). Diagnosis involves classifying features into specific classes, e.g.
is a suspicious region in the breast a fibroadenoma, a cyst or a carcinoma? Treatment
planning in radiation therapy extracts features to identify treatment areas and boundaries.
Multi-modality registration of images, in the absence of external fiducials (Section 4.3),
extracts and compares features from each modality in order to recognize correspondence
between equivalent structures.

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Object recognition & classification

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Object recognition & classification contd…
Figure 11.7(i) is an image containing both bolts and nuts, some of which lie on their sides
and present a different shape. Indeed we can distinguish between them on the basis of
their shape. The bolts are long, with an end piece, and the nuts either have a hole in them
(the “face-on” nuts) or are short and linear (the “end-on” nuts). Segmentation, in this case
by global thresholding, produces a simplified, binary image (Fig. 11.7(ii)). The skeleton
of this image shows the essential shape differences between the bolts and the two types of
nut (Fig. 11.7(iii)). Branch pixels can be extracted from this image (not shown), on the
basis of connectivity. If they are used as a seed image, and conditionally dilated under
the condition that the seed image is constrained to remain within the bounds of a mask
image (the original binary image, Fig. 11.7(ii)), this results in an image of the nuts alone
(Fig. 11.7(iv)). The bolts can now be obtained (Fig. 11.7(v)) by logically combining this
figure with the original binary figure (using [Fig. 11.7(ii) AND (NOT Fig. 11.7(iv))]).
The nuts and bolts can then be joined in a color-coded image (Fig. 11.7(vi)), which
illustrates that nuts and bolts have been recognized differently.

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 Object recognition & classification contd…
• Classification:
In any effort at designing a classifier it is essential to have a training set of images. Either
the classes to which the images belong are known (supervised learning) or they are
unknown (unsupervised learning), in which case the most appropriate classes must be
found.

The process of using data to determine the best set of features for a classifier is known as
training the classifier. The most effective methods for training classifiers involve learning
from examples. A performance metric for a set of features, based on the classification
errors it produces, should be calculated in order to evaluate the usefulness of the features.
Learning refers to some form of algorithm for reducing the classification error on a set of
training data.

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Sample Questions:

1. What do you mean by features? How can it be

categorized? Marks: 4
2. Write a brief discussion on the medical
purposes of feature recognition? Marks: 4
3. Write short notes on Object recognition and
classification. Marks: 4

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