Akira Asano

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Verified

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• Ph.D. in Applied Physics
• Professor at Kansai University

The noninverted triangle is generally regarded as more stable than the inverted one. The perception of stability/instability may vary when it is moving. Triangles moving in their pointing direction might be perceived as naturally moving and especially stable, which can lead to preferred and facilitated processing. We conducted three experiments in...

Calcification regions, which may be observed on dental panoramic radiographs, are a sign of vascular disease. Therefore, automatic detection methods based on semantic segmentation (SS) have been proposed. However, because of the small amount of data in the available dataset, the segmentation accuracy was insufficient. This paper proposes a method t...

“Resolution” in music theory means the chord progression by the transition from dissonance to consonance. More profound satisfaction is provided to listeners by using the transition than consonant chord only. The authors assumed an analogy between temporal transitions in music and colors and found that the transition could improve consonance in som...

“Resolution” in music theory means the chord progression by the transition from dissonance to consonance for providing more profound satisfaction to listeners than consonant chord only. The authors have investigated similar effects in temporal color transitions as an analogy of musical perception’s effect. In Part (1), the authors used various disp...

Carotid calcified lesions present on panoramic images are arteriosclerotic involving vascular lesions. Arteriosclerosis caused by cerebrovascular disease, which is the fourth leading cause of death in Japan, and arteriosclerotic heart disease account for the majority of sudden deaths in Japan. We believe that panoramic radiographic images can be us...

Global and local features are essential for visual-similarity texture perception. Therefore, understanding how people allocate their visual attention when viewing textures with global or local similarity is important. In this work, we investigate the influences of global and local features of a texture on eye-movement patterns and analyze the relat...

The panoramic radiography taken for the dental treatment sometimes shows carotid artery calcification and it is known that the carotid artery calcification is associated with the onset of vascular disorder. In this regard, this study focused on the right/left difference in the carotid artery calcification showed by panoramic radiography and CT. The...

In the construction of the knowledge system, visual perception is the primary means of acquiring knowledge. Thus, it is very essential to solve the problems related to visual perception. Visual complexity, as a basic aspect of visual perception, is extremely important for human being to understand and perceive the visual stimuli. This leads to an i...

An evaluation method of wrinkle shapes on fabrics using simple morphological operations is proposed. It calculates the size density function of the object indicating the region surrounded by a folded fabric in the experimental condition of the standard wrinkle/crease angle test. The characteristics of the size density function and the parameters of...

Objectives: This study proposes a new automated screening system based on a hybrid genetic swarm fuzzy (GSF) classifier using digital dental panoramic radiographs (DPR) to diagnose women with low bone mineral density (BMD) or osteoporosis. Methods: The geometrical attributes of both mandibular cortical bone and trabecular bone were acquired usin...

This paper proposes an improvement of an automatic detection method for carotid artery calcification in dental panoramic radiographs based on local intensity distribution. To improve detection rates, K-Means method with constraints is used for enhancement of an estimated shape of the calcification. For the reduction of detection error rates, “surro...

Among patients who visited our hospital with a chief complaint of disorders involving the oromandibular region, with suspected carotid artery calcification based on panoramic radiography, and who underwent computed tomography for a detailed examination of these disorders, there were four patients in whom a definitive diagnosis of carotid artery cal...

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised design method for optimal structuring element (SE) of morphological filters. We formulate the design of SE as an optimization problem, and estimate an optimal shape and brightness of SE directly from degraded images. We estimated an optimal shape and brightness by using a Genetic Algorithm (GA). Estimation...

In this paper, we propose an improvement of an automatic detection method for carotid artery calcification in dental panoramic radiographs based on local features. To reduce misdetections for the candidate region of the calcification, the proposed method is focused on the estimated shape of the calcification. Machine learning is also applied to dis...

To prevent low bone mineral density (BMD), that is, osteoporosis, in postmenopausal women, it is essential to diagnose osteoporosis more precisely. This study presented an automatic approach utilizing a histogram-based automatic clustering (HAC) algorithm with a support vector machine (SVM) to analyse dental panoramic radiographs (DPRs) and thus im...

In this paper, we propose a framework to assess visual complexity of paintings. This framework provides a machine learning scheme for investigating the relationship between human visual complexity perception and low-level image features. Since the global and local characteristics of paintings affect human's holistic impression and detail perception...

In general, viewers are more attracted to local features in images at a shorter viewing distance and to global features in images at a longer viewing distance. However, numerical analysis of the effect of viewing distance on human texture perception and how the perception of global and local changes under certain conditions are still undetermined....

In this paper, we propose a novel texture analysis method capable of estimating multiple primitives, which are elements repetitively arranged to compose a texture, in multi-structured textures. The approach is based on a texture description model that uses mathematical morphology, called the "Primitive, Grain, and Point Configuration (PGPC)" textur...

In our previous work we determined that five important characteristics affect the perception of visual complexity of a texture: regularity, roughness, directionality, density, and understandability. In this paper, a set of objective methods for measuring these characteristics is proposed: regularity is estimated by an autocorrelation function; roug...

To develop a computer-aided diagnosis system to continuously measure mandibular inferior cortical width on dental panoramic radiographs and evaluate the system's efficacy in identifying postmenopausal women with low-skeletal bone mineral density. Mandibular inferior cortical width was continuously measured by enhancing the original X-ray image, det...

Early diagnosis of osteoporosis can potentially decrease the risk of fractures and improve the quality of life. Detection of thin inferior cortices of the mandible on dental panoramic radiographs could be useful for identifying postmenopausal women with low bone mineral density (BMD) or osteoporosis. The aim of our study was to assess the diagnosti...

Visual complexity perception is an important issue in the fields of psychology and computer vision because it leads to the better understanding of the nature of human perception as well as the properties of the objects being perceived. In this study, five important characteristics of texture images that affect visual complexity perception are identifi...

An improved morphological estimation method of textural elements based on the Primitive, Grain, and Point Configuration (PGPC) texture model is proposed. The PGPC texture model has shown promising applications such as noise removal, texture modification, and texture synthesis. However, the estimation is not always successful since the magnification...

A method of estimating dual primitives in a textural image is proposed. This method is based on the Primitive, Grain, and Point Configuration (PGPC) texture model, which regards a texture as an arrangement of grains derived from one or a few primitives. Appropriate primitives can be represented by morphological structuring elements estimated from a...

The aim of this study is to develop a computer-aided osteoporosis diagnosis system that automatically determines the inferior cortical width of the mandible continuously on dental panoramic radiographs to realize statistically more robust measurements than the conventional one-point measurements. The cortical width was continuously measured on dent...

Since the surface texture of materials often affects human visual impressions as much as or more than the design, shape, or color properties, texture characteristics have been studied as features of object identification. We have been investigating the effect of texture on visual impression and objective identification using black fabrics that do n...

Information on the morphological changes of mandibular on dental panoramic image is needed to detect various diseases, especially osteoporosis. Measure automatically the width of cortical bone is one of the measurement problems due to uneven illumination and noise disturbance of the image.This paper proposes a new system that can automatically meas...

This study aimed to realize a newly developed method of continuous measurements of the cortical width of the lower border of the mandible, between the upper and lower margins of the cortical bone to identify women with low bone mineral density (BMD) or osteoporosis. An automatic clustering algorithm is applied to obtain a robust estimate of the cor...

A method of estimating dual primitives in a textural image is proposed. This method is based on the Primitive, Grain, and Point Configuration (PGPC) texture model, which regards a texture as an arrangement of grains derived from one or a few primitives. Appropriate primitives can be represented by morphological structuring elements estimated from a...

An Unsupervised Optimization of Structuring Elements for Noise Removal Using GA

Background: Mandibular bone on panoramic radiographs has been proven to be useful for identifying postmenopausal women with low skeletal bone mineral density. One of the important parts of mandibular bone is trabecular bone. Trabecular bone architecture is one of the factors that governs bone strength and may be categorized as a contributor to bone...

A method of evaluating human visual impressions of gray scale textures using morphological manipulation is proposed. To study the effects of textural features on human Kansei, we introduced a texture analysis method based on mathematical morphology. Kansei is a Japanese word for sensibility or emotion. Kansei engineering is an approach to connect h...

Measurement of an individual molar provides rich information for forensic personal identification. We propose a computer-based system for extracting an individual molar from dental panoramic radiographs. A molar is obtained by extracting the region-of-interest, separating the maxilla and mandible, and extracting the boundaries between teeth. The pr...

Estimation of a suitable window shape and appropriate weights in weighted median filters is one of important problems. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised design method for the window shapes and weights of weighted median filters. This technique is applied to texture images corrupted by impulse noise. As the performance measure for optimiz...

Deterministic multi-step crossover fusion (dMSXF) is a promising crossover method in combinatorial problems, which performs multi-step searches focusing on inheritance of parents' characteristics using a neighborhood structure and a distance measure. DMSXF shows good search ability in various kinds of combinatorial problem. In this paper, we apply...

Design of both a suitable window shape and appropriate weights in weighted median filters is one of important problems. Hitherto, unsupervised design methods of the filters by using simulated annealing (SA) or genetic algorithm (GA) have been proposed for texture images corrupted by impulse noise. These techniques estimate the optimal window shape...

This paper proposes improvement for the detection method for carotid artery calcification in dental panoramic radiographs. The existence of the carotid artery calcification as an index for arteriosclerosis attracts a great deal of attention. The detection method for carotid artery calcification has been proposed. However the detection rate is about...

Summary The main disadvantage of traditional global thresholding techniques is that they do not have an ability to exploit information of the characteristics of target images that they threshold. In this paper, we propose a hybrid thresholding method that combines the P-tile method with an edge detector to assist it in the thresholding process. Thi...

An evaluation method of human visual impressions in gray scale textures using morphological morphology is proposed. Variations of textures are generated by modifying repetitively arranged objects and configurations of the arrangements of original textures. The variations are presented to human respondents, and similarity of modified textures based...

A special sensor, like human finger tips, to measure the surface friction of various carpets with cut or loop pile has been developed. The main body of the instrument is the KES multiple device and the attachments covered with the fake skin are appropriately attached to it. This instrument provides quick and easy testing for carpets and fabrics. Th...

An eroded inferior cortex of the mandible detected on dental panoramic radiographs is useful for identifying post-menopausal women with low skeletal bone mineral density (BMD) or osteoporosis. The purposes of this study were to develop a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system that automatically determines cortical erosion of the mandible on dental p...

Mandibular cortical erosion detected on dental panoramic radiographs (DPRs) may be useful for identifying women with osteoporosis, but little is known about the variation in diagnostic efficacy of observers worldwide. The purpose of this study was to measure the accuracy in identifying women at risk for osteoporosis in a worldwide group of observer...

A thin or eroded cortex of the mandible detected on dental panoramic radiographs is independently associated with low skeletal bone mineral density (BMD) or osteoporosis in postmenopausal women. The purposes of this study were to develop new computer-aided diagnosis system that combines these two panoramic measures by using fuzzy neural net- works...

Kansei properties of the fabrics are various and relate to the aesthetics, the mass of fibers and mechanical properties. As the objective evaluation method, the fabric hand has been studied for long time. The main purpose to develop the objective evaluation using fabric hand has been how to indicate or to classify fabrics and to provide useful info...

A thin or eroded cortex of the mandible detected on dental panoramic radiographs is independently associated with low skeletal bone mineral density (BMD) or osteoporosis in postmenopausal women. The purposes of this study were to develop new computer-aided diagnosis system that combines these two panoramic measures by using fuzzy neural networks (F...

Texture, which is the integrated quality of clothing materials, affects visual impressions more than or equal to the effects of the aesthetic properties such as pattern design, color and shape. Therefore, we have been interested in the effects of texture and investigating its impressions. We have been studying the relationship between the visual im...

This paper proposes a new method of image thresholding by using cluster organization from the histogram of an image. A new similarity measure proposed is based on inter-class variance of the clusters to be merged and the intra-class variance of the new merged cluster. Experiments on practical images illustrate the effectiveness of the new method.

Mandibular inferior cortical width manually measured on dental panoramic radiographs may be useful for identifying postmenopausal women with low skeletal bone mineral density (BMD). Automatic measurement of cortical width may enable us to identify a large number of postmenopausal women with suspected low skeletal BMD. The purposes of this study wer...

In this paper, we propose a new design method for window shapes and weights of weighted median filters. This technique is applied to texture images corrupted by impulse noise. To improve mean square errors (MSE), the window shapes and weights are estimated by using the simulated annealing method, respectively. From simulation examples, the proposed...

In this paper, an extraction method of trabecular structures from dental panoramic radiographs using mathematical morphological operations is proposed. It can extract trabeculae excluding roots of teeth and enables the assessment of tooth extraction for trabecular pattern. A measurement method of the lengths and directions of trabecular segments is...

In this paper we present a fuzzy expert system for diagnosing osteoporosis based on mandibular cortical width and shape measurement on dental panoramic radiographs. We proposed a fuzzy thresholding method to find out optimal cut off threshold for input variables to provide optimal fuzzy membership functions. This system allows the dentists to deter...

Summary form only given. Quantitative evaluation of human sensibility, that is, "kansei" in Japanese, has recently attracted much attention. Kansei engineering is an approach to connect the human sensibility with engineering applications. We have investigated a relationship between the visual impressions of black fabrics and their image features fr...

Osteoporotic fractures are associated with substantial morbidity, increased medical cost and high mortality risk. Several equipments of bone assessment have been developed to identify individuals, especially postmenopausal women, with high risk of osteoporotic fracture; however, a large segment of women with low skeletal bone mineral density (BMD),...

When a texture is considered as a set of granular components of various sizes and shapes, it is meaningful to determine its features in the spatial domain. It is known that such granular features in the spatial domain can be calculated by means of the pattern spectrum obtained by morphology operations. The pattern spectrum has the property that a p...

A novel method of texture characterization, called intersize correlation of grain occurrences, is proposed. This idea is based on a model of texture description, called “Primitive, Grain and Point Configuration (PGPC)” texture model. This model assumes that a texture is composed by arranging grains, which are locally extended objects appearing actu...

This paper proposes a novel dewarping technique for document images of bound volumes. This technique is a kind of model fitting techniques for estimating the warp of each text line by fitting some elastic curve model to the text line. Differing from conventional techniques, the proposed technique is applicable to document images including local irr...

Quantitative evaluation of human sensibility, or “Kansei,” has recently attracted much attention. Evaluation of human visual impression is one of the important topics of this area. It is proposed in this paper that an objective evaluation method of human impressions based on the logistic discriminant analysis. This method applies the logistic discr...

Application of opening, which is a basic operation of mathematical morphology, often yields undesired results like the occurrence of artifacts. This problem can be avoided by using a gray scale structuring element resembling the objects in the target image. Since a texture image is composed of an arrangement of similar small objects, it is possible...

A hybridized classification system of the logistic discriminant analysis and the three-layer neural network is proposed. This system is basically a linear discrimination and is assisted by the neural network only for the cases that are difficult to be classified by linear methods. This system presents a simple discrimination structure given by line...

Image segmentation is often used to distinguish the foreground from the background. This paper proposes a novel method of image thresholding using the optimal histogram segmentation by the cluster organization based on the similarity between adjacent clusters. Since this method is not based on the minimization of a function, the problem of selectin...

A model for texture description, called “Primitive and Point Configuration (PPC) texture model,” and an estimation method of the primitive, which is an elementary object for configuring a texture, are proposed in this paper. The PPC texture model regards that a texture is composed by arranging grains that are derived from one or a few primitives b...

We have investigated “Primitive and Point Configuration (PPC) texture model,” which regards a texture to be composed by arranging grains that are derived from one or a few primitives by some modification. The PPC texture model is able to characterize primitive shapes and grain location configuration independently. We propose in this paper methods o...

Quantitative evaluation of human sensibility, or "Kansei," has recently attracted much attention. Evaluation of human visual impression is one of the important topics of this area. Most of the conventional studies have applied multivariate statistical analysis for extracting relationships between results of sensory tests and image features. These s...

A novel method for the primitive description of the multiprimitive texture is proposed. This method segments a texture by the watershed algorithm into fragments each of which contains one grain. The similar fragments are grouped by the cluster analysis in the feature space whose basis is the morphological size density. Each primitive is extracted a...

This paper proposes a method of texture analysis using morphological size distribution. Our framework is based on the concept that a texture is described by estimation of primitive, size distribution of grains derived from the primitive, and spatial distribution of the grains. We concentrate on estimation of primitive using an assumption on grain s...

A novel method of texture primitive description using morphological skeleton is proposed. The skeleton of an object has the property that it is reduced to one point when the structuring element used for the skeletonization is exactly homothetic to the object. This method applies this property. This method minimizes the number of pixels contained in...

A novel method of the multiprimitive texture analysis is proposed. This method segments a texture using the watershed algorithm into frag-ments each of which contains one grain. The size density function of each fragment is calculated, and the fragments are located in the fea-ture space each of whose basis is the size density of a size. The shape o...

Proposes a texture modelling method based on the pattern spectrum. The pattern spectrum is a mathematical morphological method to describe the size distribution of objects contained in an image. Our method is based on the idea of obtaining a model of the elementary particles that form a texture by optimizing a gray scale structuring element to fit...

It is proposed a novel method that optimizes nonlinear filters by unsupervised learning using a novel definition of morphological pattern spectrum, called "morphological opening/ closing spectrum (MOCS)." The MOCS can separate smaller portions of image objects from approximate shapes even if the shapes are degraded by noisy pixels. Our optimization...

This paper proposes a novel method of texture analysis based on mathematical morphology. The pattern spectrum is a mathematical morphological method to describe size distributions of objects contained in an image. Our method is based on the idea of optimizing the shape of structuring elements to fit the shape of elementary particles that form a tex...

A novel method of the active contour model is proposed by introducing the mathematical morphological operations on the “contour object”, which is a binary image object whose outline is the contour. The contours are shrunk and expanded by simply applying the mathematical morphological operations on the contour objects. The split and fusion of contou...

The pattern spectrum has been proposed to represent morphological size distribution of an image. However, the conventional pattern spectrum cannot extract approximate shape information from image objects spotted by noisy pixels since this is based only on opening. In this paper, a novel definition of the pattern spectrum, morphological multiresolut...

We described recently the multiresolution pattern spectrum (MPS), a method to extract the size distribution of image objects based on visual impression. In this paper, an optical implementation method of MPS is proposed using the visual area coding technique, an encoding method to operate gray scale images optically while preserving visual impressi...

The optimization methods of nonlinear filters by supervised learning have been investigated. However, the optimized filter is still uncertain to be effective for images other than the example pair of a noisy image and its ideal output used for the optimization. In this paper, a novel optimization method by unsupervised learning using a novel defini...

Mathematical morphology with gray scale structuring elements has attracted much attention, since combinations of the operations in this class can realize almost all noise- removing filters. However, the optimization method for the combination is still uncertain. In this paper, an optimization method for a mathematical morphological filter with gray...

An automated Talbot interferometer using Moiré fringe scanning and ray tracing is proposed. Our novel method can obtain the wavefront aberration by a phase object on the plane where the object itself is situated.

A simulator to aid in the design of nonlinear image processing filters is developed. This simulator assists the filter design by determining parameters manually by trial-and-error. The method is also useful for improving the results of the learning optimization methods. An example of the application of the technique to improve a resultant filter by...

The threshold logic filter is an important nonlinear filter class, which is defined by a threshold logic function of binary input values. It is proved in this paper that not all positive self-dual logical functions are threshold functions if the number of input variables is 5 or more. The positive self-dual logical filter is a limited class but inc...

An efficient algorithm based on the simulated annealing for the learning optimization of morphological filters is proposed. The learning stage is divided into two consecutive parts; the initial-learning stage finds and fixes the most important parts of the structuring elements, and the precise-learning stage determines details of the rest. This met...

An optimization method of the mathematical morphological filter is proposed. This method is based on the concept of learning by the simulated annealing. A novel neural network architecture based on mathematical morphology is utilized.

It is reported that the first partial derivative of the phase distribution for a transparent object can be measured automatically by a personal computer with an image processor. The moire pattern is formed by superimposing the Fourier image distorted by the transparent object on the master grating. But if only the moire patterns are observed, it is...

First Page of the Article

A class of new differential filter that is a generalized version of the weighted median filter is proposed. The weighted median filter is a generalization of the median filter that has weight coefficients. In this paper, we propose an extended version of the weighted median filter that has negative weight coefficients. We call it the rank-order bas...

Threshold logic filter is a broad class of the nonlinear filters. A designing method of cascaded threshold logic filters is proposed. The designing method is based on the learning rule for the multilayer neural network. The results of the optimization of the cascaded threshold logic filters are presented. Optimization includes those of the weighted...

The effects of iterations of the RANK filter are studied experimentally. The RANK filters are a new family of nonlinear filters. The effects of the RANK filters are significant because of their local adaptivity, i.e. flexibility of the shape of the filter window. Images of random values that are uniformly independently distributed are processed by...

The weighted median filter (WMF) is a generalization of the median filter. The WMF is more effective for image processing than the conventional median filter. However, the design of the parameters of the WMF is a difficult problem. A novel method of optimizing the WMF is proposed that utilizes the close relation between the nonrecursive WMF and the...