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Yongkang Wong

Publications and source records attributed to Yongkang Wong.

39 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Classification of Human Epithelial Type 2 Cell Indirect Immunofluoresence Images via Codebook Based Descriptors

The Anti-Nuclear Antibody (ANA) clinical pathology test is commonly used to identify the existence of various diseases. A hallmark method for identifying the presence of ANAs is the Indirect Immunofluorescence method on Human Epithelial (HEp-2) cells, due to its high sensitivity and the large range of antigens that can be detected. However, the method suffers from numerous shortcomings, such as being subjective as well as time and labour intensive. Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems have been developed to address these problems, which automatically classify a HEp-2 cell image into one of its known patterns (eg., speckled, homogeneous). Most of the existing CAD systems use handpicked features to represent a HEp-2 cell image, which may only work in limited scenarios. In this paper, we propose a cell classification system comprised of a dual-region codebook-based descriptor, combined with the Nearest Convex Hull Classifier. We evaluate the performance of several variants of the descriptor on two publicly available datasets: ICPR HEp-2 cell classification contest dataset and the new SNPHEp-2 dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first time codebook-based descriptors are applied and studied in this domain. Experiments show that the proposed system has consistent high performance and is more robust than two recent CAD systems.

q-bio.CB↗

Combined Learning of Salient Local Descriptors and Distance Metrics for Image Set Face Verification

In contrast to comparing faces via single exemplars, matching sets of face images increases robustness and discrimination performance. Recent image set matching approaches typically measure similarities between subspaces or manifolds, while representing faces in a rigid and holistic manner. Such representations are easily affected by variations in terms of alignment, illumination, pose and expression. While local feature based representations are considerably more robust to such variations, they have received little attention within the image set matching area. We propose a novel image set matching technique, comprised of three aspects: (i) robust descriptors of face regions based on local features, partly inspired by the hierarchy in the human visual system, (ii) use of several subspace and exemplar metrics to compare corresponding face regions, (iii) jointly learning which regions are the most discriminative while finding the optimal mixing weights for combining metrics. Face recognition experiments on LFW, PIE and MOBIO face datasets show that the proposed algorithm obtains considerably better performance than several recent state-of-the-art techniques, such as Local Principal Angle and the Kernel Affine Hull Method.

cs.CV↗

On Robust Face Recognition via Sparse Encoding: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In the field of face recognition, Sparse Representation (SR) has received considerable attention during the past few years. Most of the relevant literature focuses on holistic descriptors in closed-set identification applications. The underlying assumption in SR-based methods is that each class in the gallery has sufficient samples and the query lies on the subspace spanned by the gallery of the same class. Unfortunately, such assumption is easily violated in the more challenging face verification scenario, where an algorithm is required to determine if two faces (where one or both have not been seen before) belong to the same person. In this paper, we first discuss why previous attempts with SR might not be applicable to verification problems. We then propose an alternative approach to face verification via SR. Specifically, we propose to use explicit SR encoding on local image patches rather than the entire face. The obtained sparse signals are pooled via averaging to form multiple region descriptors, which are then concatenated to form an overall face descriptor. Due to the deliberate loss spatial relations within each region (caused by averaging), the resulting descriptor is robust to misalignment & various image deformations. Within the proposed framework, we evaluate several SR encoding techniques: l1-minimisation, Sparse Autoencoder Neural Network (SANN), and an implicit probabilistic technique based on Gaussian Mixture Models. Thorough experiments on AR, FERET, exYaleB, BANCA and ChokePoint datasets show that the proposed local SR approach obtains considerably better and more robust performance than several previous state-of-the-art holistic SR methods, in both verification and closed-set identification problems. The experiments also show that l1-minimisation based encoding has a considerably higher computational than the other techniques, but leads to higher recognition rates.

cs.CV↗