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Mario Vento
Gennaro Percannella et al. (Eds.)
Communications in Computer and Information Science 1089
Computer Analysis
of Images and Patterns
CAIP 2019 International Workshops, ViMaBi and DL-UAV
Salerno, Italy, September 6, 2019
Proceedings
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Computer Analysis
of Images and Patterns
CAIP 2019 International Workshops, ViMaBi and DL-UAV
Salerno, Italy, September 6, 2019
Proceedings
123
Editors
Mario Vento Gennaro Percannella
Department of Computer and Electrical Department of Computer and Electrical
Engineering and Applied Mathematics Engineering and Applied Mathematics
University of Salerno University of Salerno
Salerno, Italy Salerno, Italy
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ISSN 1865-0929 ISSN 1865-0937 (electronic)

Communications in Computer and Information Science
ISBN 978-3-030-29929-3 ISBN 978-3-030-29930-9 (eBook)
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Workshop Editors
Sara Colantonio Daniela Giorgi

ISTI-CNR ISTI-CNR
Pisa, Italy Pisa, Italy
Bogdan J. Matuszewski Hamideh Kerdegari
University of Central Lancashire Kingston University
Preston, UK London, UK
Manzoor Razaak
Kingston University
London, UK
Workshop Chairs
Workshop on Visual Computing and Machine Learning

for Biomedical Applications (ViMaBi)
Sara Colantonio ISTI-CNR, Italy
sara.colantonio@isti.cnr.it
Daniela Giorgi ISTI-CNR, Italy
daniela.giorgi@isti.cnr.it
Bogdan J. Matuszewski UCLan, UK
bmatuszewski1@uclan.ac.uk
Workshop on Deep-Learning Based Computer Vision

for UAV (DL-UAV)
Hamideh Kerdegari The Robot Vision Team (RoViT), Kingston University,
UK
h.kerdegari@kingston.ac.uk
Manzoor Razaak The Robot Vision Team (RoViT), Kingston University,
UK
manzoor.razaak@kingston.ac.uk
Preface
This volume contains the proceedings of the workshops included in the scientific
program of the18th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and
Patterns (CAIP 2019), which was held in Salerno, Italy, during September 6, 2019.
CAIP is a series of biennial international conferences devoted to all aspects of
computer vision, image analysis and processing, pattern recognition, and related fields.
Previous conferences were held in Ystad, Valletta, York, Seville, Münster, Vienna,
Paris, Groningen, Warsaw, Ljubljana, Kiel, Prague, Budapest, Dresden, Leipzig,
Wismar, and Berlin.
The CAIP conference itself is complemented by workshops dedicated to more
specialized themes, to cross-cutting issues, and to upcoming trends and paradigms.
This year four workshop proposals were submitted, and after a careful review process,
which was led by the general chairs and the program chairs, two of them were
accepted. The workshops took place on the day after the main conference and the
program included the following workshops:
1. Deep-learning based computer vision for UAV (DL-UAV 2019)
2. Visual Computing and Machine Learning for Biomedical Applications (ViMaBi
2019)
Each workshop had an independent Program Committee, which was in charge of
selecting the papers. The workshop papers received about 2,5 reviews per paper on
average. The workshops together received a total of 16 submissions and 12 papers were
selected to be presented at the workshops. The acceptance rate was 75%.
The success of the CAIP workshops depends on the work of many individuals and
organizations. We therefore thank all workshop organizers and reviewers for the time
and effort that they invested. We would also like to express our gratitude to the
members of the Organizing Committee and the local staff, who helped us. Sincere
thanks are due to Springer for their help in publishing the proceedings.
Lastly, we thank all participants, panelists, and keynote speakers of the CAIP
workshops for their contribution to a productive meeting. It was a pleasure to organize
and host the CAIP 2019 workshops in Salerno.
September 2019 Mario Vento

Gennaro Percannella
Organization
CAIP 2019 was organized by the Intelligent Machines for the recognition of Video,
Images and Audio (MIVIA) Laboratory, Department of Computer and Electrical
Engineering and Applied Mathematics, University of Salerno, Italy.
Executive Committees
Conference Chairs
Mario Vento University of Salerno, Italy
Gennaro Percannella University of Salerno, Italy
Program Chairs
Pasquale Foggia University of Salerno, Italy
Luca Greco University of Salerno, Italy
Pierluigi Ritrovato University of Salerno, Italy
Nicola Strisciuglio University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Local Organizing Committee

Vincenzo Carletti University of Salerno, Italy
Antonio Greco University of Salerno, Italy
Alessia Saggese University of Salerno, Italy
Vincenzo Vigilante University of Salerno, Italy
Web and Publicity Chair

Vincenzo Carletti University of Salerno, Italy
Steering Committee
George Azzopardi University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Michael Felsberg Linköping University, Sweden
Edwin Hancock University of York, UK
Xiaoyi Jiang University of Münster, Germany
Reinhard Klette Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Walter G. Kropatsch Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Gennaro Percannella University of Salerno, Italy
Nicolai Petkov University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Pedro Real Jurado University of Seville, Spain
Mario Vento University of Salerno, Italy
xii Organization
Endorsing Institution
International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)
Sponsoring Institutions
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics,

University of Salerno
Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Italian Association for Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
(CVPL)
Sponsoring Companies
A.I. Tech srl

SAST Gmbh
AI4Health srl
Gesan srl
Hanwha Techwin Europe Ltd
Nexsoft SpA
Contents
Workshop on Visual Computing and Machine Learning

for Biomedical Applications (ViMaBi)
Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: Improving State-of-the-Art

Deep Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Valentine Wargnier-Dauchelle, Camille Simon-Chane,
and Aymeric Histace
A New Hybrid Method for Gland Segmentation in Histology Images . . . . . . 17

Liyang Wang, Yu Zhou, and Bogdan J. Matuszewski
Residual Convolutional Neural Networks to Automatically Extract

Significant Breast Density Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Francesca Lizzi, Francesco Laruina, Piernicola Oliva,
Alessandra Retico, and Maria Evelina Fantacci
Combining Convolutional Neural Networks for Multi-context

Microcalcification Detection in Mammograms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Benedetta Savelli, Claudio Marrocco, Alessandro Bria,
Mario Molinara, and Francesco Tortorella
Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Through the Graph Fourier

Transform of fMRI Temporal Signals Projected on Structural Connectome. . . 45
Abdelbasset Brahim, Mehdi Hajjam El Hassani, and Nicolas Farrugia
Radiomic and Dosiomic Profiling of Paediatric Medulloblastoma

Tumours Treated with Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Cinzia Talamonti, Stefano Piffer, Daniela Greto, Monica Mangoni,
Antonio Ciccarone, Paolo Dicarolo, Maria Evelina Fantacci,
Franco Fusi, Piernicola Oliva, Letizia Palumbo, Claudio Favre,
Lorenzo Livi, Stefania Pallotta, and Alessandra Retico
May Radiomic Data Predict Prostate Cancer Aggressiveness? . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Danila Germanese, Sara Colantonio, Claudia Caudai,
Maria Antonietta Pascali, Andrea Barucci, Nicola Zoppetti,
Simone Agostini, Elena Bertelli, Laura Mercatelli, Vittorio Miele,
and Roberto Carpi
xiv Contents
Workshop on Deep-Learning Based Computer Vision for UAV (DL-UAV)
Training Deep Learning Models via Synthetic Data: Application

in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Andreas Kamilaris, Corjan van den Brink, and Savvas Karatsiolis
Computer Vision and Deep Learning-Enabled UAVs: Proposed Use

Cases for Visually Impaired People in a Smart City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Moustafa M. Nasralla, Ikram U. Rehman, Drishty Sobnath,
and Sara Paiva
UAV Image Based Crop and Weed Distribution Estimation

on Embedded GPU Boards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Mulham Fawakherji, Ciro Potena, Domenico D. Bloisi, Marco Imperoli,
Alberto Pretto, and Daniele Nardi
An Integrated Precision Farming Application Based on 5G, UAV

and Deep Learning Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Manzoor Razaak, Hamideh Kerdegari, Eleanor Davies, Raouf Abozariba,
Matthew Broadbent, Katy Mason, Vasileios Argyriou,
and Paolo Remagnino
Visual Communication with UAV: Use Cases and Achievements . . . . . . . . . 120

Alexander Schelle and Peter Stütz
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Workshop on Visual Computing and
Machine Learning for Biomedical
Applications (ViMaBi)
Workshop on Visual Computing and Machine
Learning for Biomedical Applications
(ViMaBi)
Workshop Description
These proceedings contain the contributions presented at the first Workshop on Visual
Computing and Machine Learning for Biomedical Applications (ViMaBi), held in
Salerno, Italy, on September 6, 2019, as a co-event of the 18th International Confer-
ence on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP 2019).
ViMaBi was intended for researches and clinical practitioners interested in
biomedical image computing and machine learning. In recent years, there have been
significant developments in computational image techniques for biomedical applica-
tions. These have been mainly driven by the proliferation of data-driven methods,
spearheaded by deep learning methodologies. With a gradual acceptance of these
methods in clinical practice, we are at a precipice of possibly very significant changes
to the way medical care is delivered, with intelligent machines being more and more
involved in the process. Therefore, the aim of the workshop was to present recent
developments in this fast-paced field, and to be a meeting place for academic
researchers and practitioners.
The proceedings include 7 research papers, which were selected among the 9
submitted (acceptance rate: 77%) according to the recommendations of an international
Program Committee of 22 experts, including academic researchers, medical doctors,
and members from industry, plus 2 external reviewers. Each paper was sent for peer
review to three reviewers.
The papers cover image segmentation for blood vessels (Wargnier-Dauchelle et al.)
and gland (Wang et al.); breast density classification (Lizzi et al.) and microcalcifi-
cation detection (Savelli et al.) in mammograms; analysis of neuroimaging data for
autism spectrum disorder classification (Brahim et al.); and radiomics for brain tumor
analysis in paediatric population (Talamonti et al.) and for prostate cancer analysis
(Germanese et al.).
The workshop program was completed by a keynote talk by Pietro Liò, Full Pro-
fessor of Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge, and a keynote talk by
MD Maria Aurora Morales (Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research
Council of Italy), who offered a medical perspective on visual computing and machine
learning.
The workshop chairs are grateful to all the reviewers for ensuring a high-quality
program despite the tight schedule. Special thanks are also due to the CAIP organizers
for their constant and timely support.
Workshop on Visual Computing and Machine Learning for Biomedical Applications 3
Finally, we hope that this workshop proved useful to all the participants, and set the
ground for long-term interaction and collaboration towards the identification of chal-
lenges and research directions on visual computing and machine learning for
biomedical applications.
September 2019 Sara Colantonio

Daniela Giorgi
Bogdan Matuszewski
Organization
Chairs
Sara Colantonio ISTI-CNR, Italy

Daniela Giorgi ISTI-CNR, Italy
Bogdan Matuszewski University of Central Lancashire, UK
Program Committee
Francesco Banterle ISTI-CNR, Italy

Andrea Barucci IFAC-CNR, Italy
Giuseppe Coppini IFC-CNR, Italy
Roberto Carpi USL Toscana Centro-Florence, Italy
Stefano Diciotti University of Bologna, Italy
Francisco Escolano University of Alicante, Spain
Massimo Ferri University of Bologna, Italy
Danila Germanese ISTI-CNR, Italy
Meritxell Gimeno Garcia Draco Systems, Spain
Li Guo University of Central Lancashire, UK
Ayoub Al-Hamadi Otto-von-Guericke-University, Germany
Aymeric Histace University of Cergy-Pontoise, France
Shah Khan East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, UK
Francesco Mazzini Tuscany Health Cluster, Italy
Leonardo Manetti Imaginalis, Italy
Emanuele Neri University of Pisa, Italy
Emanuele Pagliei Cosmed, Italy
Bartlomiej Papiez University of Oxford, UK
M. Antonietta Pascali ISTI-CNR, Italy
Ignazio Stanganelli IRST IRCCS Istituto Tumori Romagna
and University of Parma, Italy
Lili Tao University of West of England, UK
Tomasz Zielinski AGH University-Kraków, Poland
Additional Reviewers
Mattia G. Bergomi Champalimaud Center for the Unknown,

Portugal
Silvia Biasotti IMATI-CNR, Italy
Sponsor
Tecno Sistemi di Qualitá (TSQ) Srl, Livorno, Italy

Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation:
Improving State-of-the-Art Deep
Methods
Valentine Wargnier-Dauchelle(B) , Camille Simon-Chane, and Aymeric Histace
ETIS UMR CNRS 8051, Université Paris-Seine, Université de Cergy-Pontoise,

ENSEA, CNRS, Cergy-Pontoise, France
{valentine.wargnier,camille.simon-chane,aymeric.histace}@ensea.fr
Abstract. Retinal blood vessels segmentation is an important step for

computer-aided early diagnosis of several retinal vascular diseases, in par-
ticular diabetic retinopathy. This segmentation is necessary to evaluate
the state of the vascular network and to detect abnormalities (aneurysms,
hemorrhages, etc). Many image processing and machine learning meth-
ods have been developed in recent years in order to achieve this segmen-
tation. These methods are difficult to compare with one another since the
evaluation conditions vary greatly. Moreover, public databases often pro-
vide multiple ground truths. In this paper, we implement a competitive
state-of-the art method and evaluate it on the DRIVE (Digital Retinal
Images for Vessel Extraction) public database. Based on this method, we
test and present several improvements which are evaluated using a ded-
icated performance evaluation protocol. This protocol uses five criteria
and three different evaluations in order to assess the robustness of the
methods’ performances.
Keywords: Retinal blood vessels segmentation · Deep learning ·

Convolutional neural network · U-Net · DRIVE
1 Introduction
Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness before age 65 around the
world [14]. It affects up to 80% of those who have had diabetes for over 20
years. The excess of sugar in the blood weakens the capillary walls, causing
a loss in tightness and eventually the rupture and the bursting of the vessels.
The retina is one of the first areas affected by the degeneration of the vascular
network because of the small size of the retinal vessels. These vessels can be easily
repaired using a laser but the problem must be tackled quickly since the damage
is irreversible. Retinal blood vessel segmentation can provide information on
the vessels’ thickness and tortuosity and be used to detect abnormalities like
microaneurysm. These characteristics are used to evaluate the progress of the
disease and act before blindness occurs. Automatic vessel segmentation is thus a
major challenge in this area and many approaches have been proposed in recent
c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
M. Vento and G. Percannella (Eds.): CAIP 2019 Workshops, CCIS 1089, pp. 5–16, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29930-9_1
6 V. Wargnier-Dauchelle et al.
years. They can be divided into three main groups: ad-hoc, machine learning
and hybrid methods.
The majority of ad-hoc methods are based on low-level image processing and
mathematical morphology methods to estimate the blood vessels boundaries.
For example, Hajer et al. [4] use the top hat transform with a linear structur-
ing element, whereas Xue et al. [13] developed a method inspired by saliency
detection algorithms.
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the most used machine learning
methods. In Birgui-Sekou et al. [1,2], an encoder-decoder CNN is implemented
with patches and then fine tuned with complete images. Liskowski et al. [7]
add dense layers in the CNN whereas Zhou et al. [16] use the green channel to
enhance the detection of thin vessels after training on grayscale image patches.
Hybrid methods combine both approaches: Ricci et al. [9] achieve the seg-
mentation using a SVM (Support Vector Machine) with features extracted from
a line detector. Hassan et al. [5] combine mathematical morphology operators
such as opening, top hat transform and Gaussian filtering with machine learning
using k-mean clustering. A deeper analysis and comparison of vessel segmenta-
tion methods is presented in [11].
These methods are classically evaluated for accuracy, specificity and sen-
sitivity. Indeed, a satisfying blood vessel segmentation algorithm must detect
thin vessels with few false alarms. Comparing state-of-the-art methods is not a
straightforward task. First of all, these methods can be evaluated on different
databases. In the case of the DRIVE database, commonly used for vessel seg-
mentation, two ground truths are provided for the test set. Furthermore, the
evaluation protocol is not always sufficiently detailed to be reproduced. Because
of the segmentation variability and the numerous hyper parameters, the choice
of a evaluation criteria is not trivial. The trade-off between sensitivity and speci-
ficity complicates the comparison between state-of-the-art methods since a speci-
ficity increase causes a sensitivity decrease. It is thus important to use the same
evaluation protocol to correctly compare different methods.
In this paper, we evaluate several segmentation methods on the DRIVE
database using the two ground truths of the test set and the leave-one-out
method on the training set. This complete evaluation permits to efficiently com-
pare the methods on several criteria. As a baseline, we use the competitive work
of Birgui-Sekou which presents a 95,58% accuracy, 98,37% specificity and 76,58%
sensitivity [1,2]. As all the state-of-the-art methods, the weakness of this method
is the sensitivity. We propose several potential improvements that we compare
to the baseline implementation.
In the following section we describe the architectures tested. In Sect. 3, we
present the database and introduce our evaluation protocol. Section 4 presents
the results for the four CNN architectures. The last section concludes the paper.
2 Architectures
We start by re-implementing the architecture of Birgui-Sekou et al. [1,2]. We then
present several variations of this architecture to improve the vessel segmentation:
Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation 7
the use of the green channel instead of the grayscale images, a U-Net variation
of the initial architecture and the use of a different loss function.
2.1 Baseline: Birgui-Sekou Architecture
As a baseline, we choose an encoder-decoder architecture with competitive

results for the segmentation of blood vessels, proposed by Birgui-Sekou et
al. [1,2].
The encoder transcribes information into another abstract representation
space while the decoder builds the segmentation from the features of this rep-
resentation space. It reduces the space size before re-increasing it in order to
find a segmentation mask with the same size as the input image. ReLu are used
after each convolution to introduce non-linearity whereas a sigmoid is used for
the last layer. The output is thus confined between 0 and 1 corresponding to a
vessel-presence probability.
The loss function used is a sum of the cross-entropy, which is often used for
segmentation, and the L1 norm to avoid over-fitting. It is defined as:
loss(y, ỹ) = CE(y, ỹ) + α||y − ỹ||1 (1)
where y is the ground truth, ỹ is the prediction and CE is the cross-entropy. We

set α = 10−4 .
The model runs on grayscale images calculated as the luminance of the RGB
images using the weights given by the International Telecommunication Union
Recommendation (Rec.ITU-R BT.601-7).
2.2 First Proposal: Green Channel Inputs

Many morphological blood segmentation methods are computed on the green
input channel to enhance the contrast between the vessels and their back-
ground [3]. We thus run the baseline model directly on the green channel of
the input images to see if this also improves the performance of CNN-based
methods, simplifying the use of the green channel proposed by Zhou et al. [16].
2.3 Second Proposal: U-Net Variation
U-Net is a very powerful deep CNN, mostly used for biomedical image seg-
mentation [10]. It provides good performances on very different biomedical seg-
mentation applications, especially for small datasets using patches, for example
to segment tumors and organs [6]. U-Net architectures introduce aggregations
between encoder and decoder layers, combining different scale features.
We transformed the original Birgui-Sekou et al. architecture [1,2], into a U-
Net architecture by adding concatenations with past layers for each up-sampling,
as shown Fig. 1. We use the same loss function as the original Birgui-Sekou et
al. architecture and run it on the green channel of the images.
Fig. 1. Architecture 2: U-Net type. Blue arrows: Convolution 3 × 3, ReLu, stride 1.

Green: Convolution 3 × 3, ReLu, stride 2. Yellow: Convolution 3 × 3, Sigmoid, stride
1. Orange: Up-Sampling 2 × 2. Purple: Concatenation. (Color figure online)
2.4 Third Proposal: Poisson Loss Function

The Poisson loss function is defined as:
1
loss(y, ỹ) = (ỹ[i] − y[i]) log(ỹ[i] + ) (2)
N
where y is the ground truth and ỹ is the prediction. This loss function greatly
increases if the prediction is a false negative. As such, it seems well-suited to
increase the sensitivity of the segmentation. We thus run the U-Net variation
architecture with the Poisson loss function on the green channel.
3 Methodology
3.1 Database
The architectures are evaluated on the DRIVE database, which is composed of
20 RGB training images and 20 RGB test images (size 565 × 584 pixels) [12].
Each image is provided with a binary mask segmenting its field of view (FOV).
The training set is provided with one ground truth per image whereas the test
set provides two ground truths per image, one known as the gold standard and
the other based on human perception (see Fig. 3).
3.2 Training
We pre-process these input images using the same steps as Birgui et al. [1,2].
First, the input RGB images are reduced to a single channel (grayscale or
green). Then a gamma correction is applied (gamma = 1.7). Finally, we use the
CLAHE (Contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization) algorithm for con-
trast enhancement, to make the vessels more visible.
From these images, we extract 32 × 32 size patches with an eight-pixel step.
Examples of patches are presented in Fig. 2. Vessels on green channel patches
seem to be more contrasted. We only keep the patches which are completely
inside the FOV mask, resulting in approximately 3000 patches per image. We
enlarge and balance the database by adding 1000 randomly-drawn vessel-centred
patches per image. The final training database is thus composed of 80 864
patches. This database is also empirically augmented by random 90◦ rotations
and horizontal and vertical flips.
All architectures are trained on 3 epochs with a batch size of 128. We chose
the Adadelta optimizer because of its adaptive learning rate capabilities [15].
3.3 Segmentation Mask Generation
Each test image is evaluated by extracting square patches of size 32 × 32, with a
single pixel step. Each of these patches is individually segmented by the network.
The global output is the sum of each segmentation patch divided by 1024. The
result is a grayscale image of the same size as the input image which corresponds
to a vessel-presence probability map (Fig. 4). The division produces an edge
effect which is visible on the probability maps but has no effect on the final
segmentation map since the FOV does not reach the image borders.
We binarize this probability map by thresholding. A few morphological tools
are then used to clean the image: smaller groups of pixels, which mainly cor-
respond to noise, are removed and a closing is applied with a disk of radius
2 pixels in order to repair vessels. All these post-processing parameters influ-
ence the quality of the final segmentation. Indeed, a high threshold will improve
the specificity whereas a lower one will improve the sensitivity. Final binary seg-
mentation masks are illustrated Figs. 5 and 6, respectively for the Gold Standard
ground truth and the Human Perception ground truth of Fig. 3. To best com-
pare the methods, we empirically choose the parameters that result in the best
compromise between sensitivity and specificity.
3.4 Performance Evaluation Protocol
Our models are evaluated on the test set with the two ground truths but also
using the leave-one-out method on the training set. This enables us to take into
account the variability of the manual segmentation and evaluate the robustness
to the database and to the weights’ initialization of our models. For the classic
evaluation, the CNN is trained on all the training set images and then each
image from the test set is passed to the CNN. For the leave-one-out evaluation,
the CNN is trained on the full training dataset minus the current test image.
The evaluation is then performed on the current test image. The resulting seg-
mentations are evaluated using the following commonly used metrics at the pixel
level: accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPE), Dice coefficient and
area under the ROC curve (AUC).
Fig. 2. Examples of patches (size 32 × 32 pixels): (a) Grayscale. (b) Green channel.
Fig. 3. Example images from the DRIVE dataset: (a, b, c) Fundus image. The fovea
is the dark spot (center of image (a)), the optical disk is the light spot (on the left
in image (a)). (d, e, f) Gold standard segmentation ground truth. (g, h, i) Human
perception segmentation ground truth where blue represents lacks and red represents
additions compared to Gold standard. (Insets) Zoom on a detail. (Color figure online)
Fig. 4. Examples of CNN outputs before thresholding: (a, b, c) Baseline. (d, e, f)

Baseline on green channel. (g, h, i) U-net on green channel. (j, k, l) U-Net with Poisson
loss on green channel. (Insets) Zoom on a detail.
Fig. 5. Examples of segmentation results compared to the gold standard ground truth,
where blue represents false negative, red represents false positive and white represents
true positive: (a, b, c) Segmentation with baseline method. (d, e, f) Segmentation with
baseline method on green channel images. (g, h, i) Segmentation with U-Net architec-
ture on green channel. (j, k, l) Segmentation with U-Net architecture and Poisson loss
function on green channel. (Insets) Zoom on a detail. (Color figure online)
Fig. 6. Examples of segmentation results compared to the human perception ground

truth, where blue represents false negative, red represents false positive and magenta
represents true positive: (a, b, c) Segmentation with baseline method. (d, e, f) Seg-
mentation with baseline method on green channel images. (g, h, i) Segmentation with
U-Net architecture on green channel. (j, k, l) Segmentation with U-Net architecture
and Poisson loss function on green channel. (Insets) Zoom on a detail. (Color figure
online)
Table 1. Evaluation of the segmentation results on test set for the two ground truths
(Example results Figs. 5 and 6).
Model Gold standard Human perception

AUC ACC SEN SPE DICE AUC ACC SEN SPE DICE
Baseline [1, 2] 90.44 92.14 80.78 93.84 72.33 90.81 92.49 83.35 93.81 73.02
Green channel 91.33 92.57 81.65 94.20 73.64 90.63 92.79 83.74 94.09 73.90
+ U-Net 91.70 92.54 81.55 94.19 73.62 91.13 92.89 84.13 94.15 74.34
+ Poisson loss 90.99 91.76 81.29 93.31 71.50 90.06 91.95 83.27 93.20 71.64
Table 2. Evaluation of the segmentation results with the leave-one-out method where
x represents the average and σ represents the standard deviation.
Model AUC ACC SEN SPE DICE

x x σ x σ x σ x σ
Baseline [1, 2] 88.79 90.82 5.13 70.41 10.18 93.75 6.90 67.09 7.40
Green channel 90.17 91.19 5.59 71.82 13.03 94.13 7.33 68.45 8.66
+ U-Net 90.27 92.09 3.38 72.76 8.41 94.78 4.56 70.66 6.36
+ Poisson loss 91.62 89.94 8.15 69.17 15.64 93.15 10.40 65.36 11.30
4 Results and Discussion
The average metrics over all 20 test images for the different architectures are
summarized in Table 1 for the classic evaluation and in Table 2 for the leave-one
out evaluation.
We are unable to reproduce the original accuracy metrics of Bigui-Sekou et
al. (AUC = 98.01, ACC = 95.58, SPE = 98.37, SEN = 76.65) [2]. We do not know
all their protocol parameters and thus our implementation probably varies from
theirs. In the original papers the training is done on patches and refined on full
images [1,2], while we train on patches and generate a segmentation using CNN
output patches.
We have also chosen the post-processing parameters in order to compare the
methods on sensitivity, the weakness of many state-of-the-art methods, whereas
Bigui-Sekou et al. tend to maximize the accuracy. A high accuracy is linked
to a high specificity since there are much more background pixels than vessel
pixels. A trade-off between specificity and sensitivity must be chosen through
the post-processing parameters.
The difference between the four architectures is quite small (less than 1%
between the highest and lowest accuracy). However, the use of the green channel
instead of the grayscale luminance improves all of the evaluation metrics, and
in particular the sensitivity. This confirms the utility of using the green channel
to differentiate blood-vessels from their background.
The U-Net architecture globally provides a better sensitivity/specificity
trade-off: it similarly performs to the baseline on the green channel for the
Gold Standard segmentation ground truth and slightly better than this sec-
ond proposal on the Human Perception ground truth. The two ground truths
are introduced by Niemeijer et al. with no explanation of the chosen denomina-
tions (Gold Standard vs. Human Perception) [8]. These ground-truth dependent
results highlight the high intra- and inter-variability of manual segmentation.
Using the leave-one-out method on the training dataset, the performance of
the U-Net architecture is the most satisfying. This evaluation method is used
to compare the models’ robustness to the weights’ initialization and to varying
databases. The U-Net architecture on the green channel is thus the most robust
architecture.
The direct CNN outputs are very different for each model (Fig. 4). The green
channel tends to detect more blood vessels, improving the sensitivity. The U-Net
outputs present less noise whereas the Poisson loss function drastically increases
this noise. This shows that the architecture which uses the Poisson loss function
learns faster than the others. As we compare the methods with the same number
of learning epochs, the Poisson loss is disadvantaged.
5 Conclusion and Perspectives
In this paper, we evaluated different improvements for state-of-the-art deep

learning methods for retinal blood vessels segmentation. The complete and
robust proposed evaluation method permits to compare methods on many points
using classical criteria. Thus, the robustness of the method to the database, to
the weights’ initialization and to the manual segmentation ground truth is also
evaluated.
First, it shows that the green channel is a better choice on which to run
the models than the grayscale lumimance. Furthermore, we demonstrate the
robustness of a U-Net architecture for the segmentation task.
For comparison purposes, we used the same pre-processing on the green chan-
nel and on the input grayscale as Birgui-Sekou et al. [1,2]. The value of the
gamma correction should be adapted in order to improve the segmentation per-
formances. We also notice that the optical disk and the fovea disrupt the correct
segmentation of the blood vessels. They could be detected and remove as part-of
the pre-processing.
The usefulness of the Poisson loss function has not been demonstrated. How-
ever, it could be integrated in a custom loss function, with for example the cross
entropy, to increase the sensitivity of a deep learning method.
Our future works will use this retinal blood vessels segmentation method
for other vessels segmentation as the skin micro-circulation using rough transfer
learning or fine tuning.
References
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volution pour la segmentation de vaisseaux sanguins rétiniens - Des patchs aux
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A New Hybrid Method for Gland
Segmentation in Histology Images
Liyang Wang(&), Yu Zhou, and Bogdan J. Matuszewski
Computer Vision and Machine Learning Research Group,

School of Engineering, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
{lywang,yzhou11,bmatuszewski1}@uclan.ac.uk
Abstract. Gland segmentation has become an important task in biomedical

image analysis. An accurate gland segmentation could be instrumental in
designing of personalised treatments, potentially leading to improved patient
survival rate. Different gland instance segmentation architectures have been
tested in the work reported here. A hybrid method that combines two-level
classification has been described. The proposed method achieved very good
image-level classification results with 100% classification accuracy on the
available test data. Therefore, the overall performance of the proposed hybrid
method highly depends on the results of the pixel-level classification. Diverse
image features reflecting various morphological gland structures visible in his-
tology images have been tested in order to improve the performance of the gland
instance segmentation. Based on the reported experimental results, the hybrid
approach, which combines two-level classification, achieved overall the best
results among the tested methods.
Keywords: Gland segmentation Two-level classification Deep learning

Random forest
1 Introduction
Colorectal cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers, which affects both
women and men. Accurate cancer grading is essential for individual cancer treatment
planning and resulting patient survival rate. Different morphological structures of the
gland objects can be used for grading. Therefore, accurate segmentation of gland
structures in histology images is important in order to support assessment of the cancer.
One of the reasons why gland segmentation is challenging is that the structure and
appearance of histology images, even for the same tissue, can look significantly dif-
ferent. Furthermore, the gland size, shape, texture and appearance could vary signifi-
cantly even within the same gland category. Due to these reasons, gland segmentation
is a challenging problem. The proposed hybrid method deals with these challenges by
dividing the images into tissue type categories first and solving the pixel-wise classi-
fication separately for each predefined category of the histology image.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

M. Vento and G. Percannella (Eds.): CAIP 2019 Workshops, CCIS 1089, pp. 17–27, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29930-9_2
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
have been through what it relieved me from to know how not suffering from one’s food
all the while, after having suffered all one’s life, and at last having it cease and vanish,
could make one joyously and extravagantly relegate all out-of-door motion to a more
and more casual and negligible importance. To live without the hell goad of needing to
walk, with time for reading and indoor pursuits,—a delicious, insidious bribe! So,
more and more, I gave up locomotion, and at last almost completely. A year and a half
ago the thoracic worry began. Walking seemed to make it worse, tested by short spurts.
So I thought non-walking more and more the remedy, and applied it more and more,
and ate less and less, naturally. My heart was really disgusted all the while at my
having ceased to call upon it. I have begun to do so again, and with the most luminous
response. I am better the second half hour of my walk than the first, and better the
third than the second.… I am, in short, returning, after an interval deplorably long
and fallacious, to a due amount of reasonable exercise and a due amount of food for
the same.
A Page from an Autograph Letter from Henry James to Horace Fletcher

My one visit to Lamb House was in company with Horace Fletcher. The
meeting with Henry James at dinner had corrected several preconceived ideas
and confirmed others. Some writers are revealed by their books, others conceal
themselves in their fictional prototypes. It had always been a question in my
mind whether Henry James gave to his stories his own personality or received
his personality from his stories. This visit settled my doubts.
The home was a perfect expression of the host, and possessed an
individuality no less unique. I think it was Coventry Patmore who christened it
“a jewel set in the plain,”—located as it was at the rising end of one of those
meandering streets of Rye, in Sussex, England, Georgian in line and perfect in
appointment.
In receiving us, Henry James gave one the impression of performing a
long-established ritual. He had been reading in the garden, and when we
arrived he came out into the hall with hand extended, expressing a massive
cordiality.
“Welcome to my beloved Fletcher,” he cried; and as he grasped my hand
he said, as if by way of explanation,
“He saved my life, you know, and what is more, he improved my
disposition. By rights he should receive all my future royalties,—but I doubt if
he does!”
His conversation was much more intelligible than his books. It was
ponderous, but every now and then a subtle humor relieved the impression
that he felt himself on exhibition. One could see that he was accustomed to
play the lion; but with Fletcher present, toward whom he evidently felt a deep
obligation, he talked intimately of himself and of the handicap his stomach
infelicities had proved in his work. The joy with which he proclaimed his
emancipation showed the real man,—a Henry James unknown to his
characters or to his public.
If William James had not taken up science as a profession and thus

become a philosopher, he would have been a printer. No other commercial
pursuit so invited him as “the honorable, honored, and productive business of
printing,” as he expressed it in a letter to his mother in 1863. Naturally, with
such a conception of the practice of book manufacture, he was always
particularly concerned with the physical format of his volumes. He once told
me that my ability to translate his “fool ideas” into type showed the benefit of
a Harvard education! He had no patience with any lapse on the part of the
proofreader, and when the galleys of his books reached this point in the
manufacture even my most experienced readers were on the anxious seat. On
the other hand, he was generous in his appreciation when a proofreader called
his attention to some slip in his copy that he had overlooked.
After his volume Pragmatism appeared and created such universal attention,
a series of “popular” lectures on the subject was announced at Cambridge.
The Harpers had just published a novel of mine entitled The Spell, in
connection with which I had devoted much time to the study of humanism
and the humanists of the fifteenth century. Because of my familiarity with a
kindred subject, I must confess to a sense of mortification that in reading
Pragmatism I found myself beyond my depth. A “popular” presentation
appealed to me as an opportunity for intellectual development, so I attended
the first lecture, armed with pencil and notebook. Afterwards it so happened
that Professor James was on the trolley car when I boarded it at Harvard
Square, and I sat down beside him.
“I was surprised to see you at my lecture,” he remarked. “Don’t you get
enough of me at your office?”
I told him of my excursions into other philosophic pastures, and of my
chagrin to find so little in pragmatic fields upon which my hungry mind could
feed. He smiled at my language, and entered heartily into the spirit.
“And today?” he inquired mischievously.—“I hope that today I guided you
successfully.”
“You did,” I declared, opening my notebook, and showing him the entry:
“Nothing is the only resultant of the one thing which is not.”
“That led me home,” I said soberly, with an intentional double meaning.
Professor James laughed heartily.
“Did I really say that? I have no doubt I did. It simply proves my
contention that philosophers too frequently exercise their prerogative of
concealing themselves behind meaningless expressions.”
Two of Professor James’ typographic hobbies were paper labels and as few
words as possible on the title page. In the matter of supplying scant copy for
the title, he won my eternal gratitude, for many a book, otherwise
typographically attractive, is ruined by overloading the title with too much
matter. This is the first page that catches the eye, and its relation to the book is
the same as the door of a house. Only recently I opened a volume to a
beautiful title page. The type was perfectly arranged in proportion and margin,
the decoration was charming and in complete harmony with the type. It was
set by an artist-printer and did him credit; but turning a few more pages I
found myself face to face with a red-blooded story of western life, when the
title had prepared me for something as delicate as Milton’s L’Allegro. A
renaissance door on a New England farmhouse would have been equally
appropriate!
I commend to those who love books the fascinating study of title pages. I
entered upon it from curiosity, and quickly found in it an abiding hobby. The
early manuscripts and first printed volumes possessed no title pages, due
probably to the fact that the handmade paper and parchment were so costly
that the saving of a seemingly unnecessary page was a consideration. The incipit
at the top of the first page, reading “Here beginneth” and then adding the
name of the author and the subject, answered every purpose; and on the last
page the explicit marked the conclusion of the work, and offered the printer an
excellent opportunity to record his name and the date of the printing. Most of
the early printers were modest in recording their achievements, but in the
famous volume De Veritate Catholicæ Fidei the printer says of himself:
This new edition was furnished us to print in Venice by Nicolas Jenson of France.…
Kind toward all, beneficent, generous, truthful and steadfast in the beauty, dignity, and
accuracy of his printing, let me (with the indulgence of all) name him the first in the
whole world; first likewise in his marvelous speed. He exists in this, our time, as a
special gift from Heaven to men. June thirteen, in the year of Redemption 1489.
Farewell
Bibliographers contend that the first title page was used in a book printed
by Arnold Ther Hoernen of Cologne in 1470. In this volume an extra leaf is
employed containing simply an introduction at the top. It has always seemed
to me that this leaf is more likely to have been added by the printer to correct
a careless omission of the introduction on his first page of text. Occasionally,
in the humanistic manuscript volumes in the Laurenziana Library, at Florence,
there occurs a “mirror” title (see opp. page), which consists of an illuminated
page made up of a large circle in the center containing the name of the book,
sometimes surrounded by smaller circles, in which are recorded the titles of
the various sections. This seems far more likely to have been suggestive of
what came to be the formal title page.
MIRROR TITLE
From Augustinus: Opera, 1485. Laurenziana Library, Florence
By the end of the fifteenth century the title page was in universal use, and
printers showed great ingenuity in arranging the type in the form of wine cups,
drinking glasses, funnels, inverted cones, and half-diamonds. During the
sixteenth century great artists like Dürer, Holbein, Rubens, and Mantegna
executed superbly engraved titles entirely out of keeping with the poor
typography of the books themselves. In many of the volumes the title page
served the double purpose of title and full-page illustration (see pages 228 and
241). What splendid examples would have resulted if the age of engraved titles
had coincided with the high-water mark in the art of printing!
As the art of printing declined, the engraved title was discarded, and the
printer of the seventeenth century seemed to feel it incumbent upon him to
cover the entire page with type. If you recall the early examples of American
Colonial printing, which were based upon the English models of the time, you
will gain an excellent idea of the grotesque tendency of that period. The
Elzevirs were the only ones who retained the engraved title (page 241). The
Baskerville volumes (page 247), in the middle of the eighteenth century, showed
a return to good taste and harmonious co-ordination with the text; but there
was no beauty in the title until Didot in Paris and Bodoni in Parma, Italy,
introduced the so-called “modern” face, which is peculiarly well adapted to
display (page 253). William Morris, in the late nineteenth century, successfully
combined decoration with type,—over-decorated, in the minds of many, but in
perfect keeping with the type pages of the volumes themselves. Cobden-
Sanderson, at the Doves Press, returned to the extreme in simplicity and good
taste (page 265), excelling all other printers in securing from the blank space on
the leaf the fullest possible value. One of Cobden-Sanderson’s classic remarks
is, “I always give greater attention, in the typography of a book, to what I leave
out than to what I put in.”
The name of William Morris today may be more familiar to booklovers

than that of Cobden-Sanderson, but I venture to predict that within a single
decade the latter’s work as printer and binder at the Doves Press at
Hammersmith, London, will prove to have been a more determining factor in
printing as an art than that of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, and that
the general verdict will be that Cobden-Sanderson carried out the splendid
principles laid down by Morris more consistently than did that great artist-
craftsman himself.
T. J. COBDEN-SANDERSON, 1841–1922
From Etching by Alphonse Legros, 1893
The story of Cobden-Sanderson’s life is an interesting human document.

He told it to me one evening, its significance being heightened by the
simplicity of the recital. At seventeen he was apprenticed to an engineer, but
he worked less than a year in the draft room. He disliked business as business,
and began to read for Cambridge, with the idea of entering the Church. While
at Trinity College he read for mathematical honors, but three years later,
having given up all idea of going into the Church, he left Cambridge, refusing
honors and a degree, which he might have had, as a protest against the
competitive system and the “warp” it gave to all university teaching. Then, for
seven or eight years, he devoted himself to Carlyle and the study of literature,
“Chiefly German philosophy,” he said, “which is perhaps not literature,”
supporting himself by desultory writing and practicing medicine. When he was
thirty years old he was admitted to the Bar, which profession he abandoned
thirteen years later to become a manual laborer. The following is quoted from
notes which I made after this conversation:
I despaired of knowledge in a philosophical sense, yet I yearned to do or to make
something. This was the basic idea of my life. At this time it was gradually revealed to
me that the arts and crafts of life might be employed to make society itself a work of
art, sound and beautiful as a whole, and in all its parts.
It is difficult to associate Cobden-Sanderson’s really tremendous
contributions to bookmaking as an art with his self-effacing personality. If I
had met the man before I had become intimately acquainted with his work, I
should have been disappointed; having had him interpreted to me by his
books before I met him, his unique personality proved a definite inspiration
and gave me an entirely new viewpoint on many phases of the art of
typography in its application to human life.
In person, Cobden-Sanderson was of slight build, with sloping shoulders,
his most noticeable feature being his reddish beard tinged with gray. He was
nervous and shy, and while talking seldom looked one squarely in the eye, yet
at no time could one doubt the absolute sincerity of his every word and act.
He was hopelessly absent-minded. Invited to dine with me in London, he
appeared the evening before the date set, retiring overwhelmed with
embarrassment when he discovered his mistake. On the following evening he
forgot the appointment altogether! Later, when in Boston, he accepted an
invitation to dine with a literary society, but failed to appear because he could
not remember where the dinner was to be held. He had mislaid his note of
invitation and could not recall the name of the man who sent it. On that
evening he dashed madly around the city in a taxicab for over an hour, finally
ending up at his hotel in absolute exhaustion while the members of the literary
society dined without their lion!
While president of the Society of Printers in Boston, I arranged for
Cobden-Sanderson to come to America to deliver some lectures on The Ideal
Book. Among these were four given at Harvard University. At the conclusion
of the last lecture he came to my library, thoroughly tired out and completely
discouraged. Seated in a great easy chair he remained for several moments in
absolute silence, resting his face upon his hands. Suddenly, without a moment’s
warning, he straightened up and said with all the vehemence at his command,
“I am the veriest impostor who ever came to your shores!”
Seeing my surprise and incredulity, he added,
“I have come to America to tell you people how to make books. In New
York they took me to see the great Morgan Library and other collections.
They showed me rare incunabula. They expected me to know all about them,
and to be enthusiastic over them. As a matter of fact, I know nothing about
the work of the great master-printers, and care less!”
My face must have disclosed my thoughts, for he held up a restraining
hand.
“Don’t think me such an egotist as my words imply. It isn’t that at all. It is
true that I am interested only in my own work, but that is because my work
means something more to me than the books I produce. When I print a book
or bind one it is because I have a message in my soul which I am impelled to
give mankind, and it comes out through my fingers. Other men express their
messages in different media,—in stone or on canvas. I have discovered that the
book is my medium. When I bind and decorate a volume I seem to be setting
myself, like a magnetized needle, or like an ancient temple, in line and all
square, not alone with my own ideal of society, but with that orderly and
rhythmical whole which is the revelation of science and the normal of
developed humanity. You asked me a while ago to explain certain
inconsistencies in my work, and I told you that there was no explanation. That
is because each piece of work represents me at the time I do it. Sometimes it is
good and sometimes poor, but, in any case, it stands as the expression of
myself at the time I did it.”
As he spoke I wondered if Cobden-Sanderson had not explained why, in
the various arts, the work of those master-spirits of the past had not been
surpassed or even equaled during the intervening centuries. It is a matter for
consideration, when the world has shown such spectacular advance along
material lines, that in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in printing, the
work of the old masters still stands supreme. In their time, when men had
messages in their souls to give the world, the interpretation came out through
their fingers, expressed in the medium with which each was familiar. Before
the invention of printing, the masses received those messages directly from the
marble or the canvas, or from the design of some great building. The printed
book opened to the world a storehouse of wisdom hitherto unavailable, and
made individual effort less conspicuous and therefore less demanded. The few
outstanding figures in every art have been those who, like Cobden-Sanderson,
have set themselves “in line and all square, not alone with their own ideals of
society, but with that orderly and rhythmical whole which is the revelation of
science and the normal of developed humanity.” It is what Cobden-Sanderson
has done rather than his written words, that conveys the greatest message.
While Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States, and on the
occasion of one of his several visits to Boston, his secretary wrote that the
President would like to examine with me some of the special volumes I had
built. I knew him to be an omnivorous reader, but until then did not realize his
deep interest in the physical side of books.
He came to the University Press one bitterly cold day in January, and
entered my office wrapped in a huge fur coat. After greeting him I asked if he
wouldn’t lay the coat aside.
“Of course I will,” he replied briskly; “it is just as easy to catch hot as it is
to catch cold.”
We devoted ourselves for an hour to an examination and discussion of
certain volumes I had produced. One of these was a small twelve-mo entitled
Trophies of Heredia containing poems by José-Maria de Heredia, brought out in
artistic format for a Boston publishing house, which had proved a complete
failure from a commercial standpoint. Probably not over two hundred copies
of the book were ever sold. Evidently one of these had fallen into the
President’s hands, for he seized my copy eagerly, saying,
“Hello! I didn’t remember that you made this. Extraordinary volume, isn’t
it? I want to show you something.”
Quickly turning to one of the pages he pointed to the line, The hidden
warmth of the Polar Sea.
“What do you think of that?” he demanded. “Did you ever think of the
Polar Sea as being warm? And by Jove he’s right,—it is warm!”
Later, in Washington, I accepted his invitation for luncheon at the White
House and for an afternoon in his library, where we continued our discussion
of books. Before we turned to the volumes, he showed me some of the
unusual presents which various potentates had given him, such as a jade bear
from the Tzar of Russia, a revolver from Admiral Togo, and line drawings
made personally by the Kaiser, showing in detail every ship in our Navy. When
I expressed surprise that such exact knowledge should be in the possession of
another country, my host became serious.
“The Kaiser is a most extraordinary fellow,” he said deliberately,—“not
every one realizes how extraordinary. He and I have corresponded ever since I
became President, and I tell you that if his letters were ever published they
would bring on a world war. Thank God I don’t have to leave them behind
when I retire. That’s one prerogative the President has, at any rate.”
I often thought of these comments after the World War broke out. An
echo of them came while the desperate struggle was in full force. Ernest
Harold Baynes, nature-lover and expert on birds, was visiting at my house,
having dined with the ex-President at Oyster Bay the week before. In speaking
of the dinner, Baynes said that Roosevelt declared that had he been President,
Germany would never have forced the war at the time she did. When pressed
to explain, Roosevelt said:
“The Kaiser would have remembered what he outlined to me in some
letters he wrote while I was President. Bill knows me, and I know Bill!”
From the library we extended our examination to the family living-room,
where there were other volumes of interest on the tables or in the bookcases.
From these, the President picked up a hand-lettered, illuminated manuscript
which he had just received as a present from King Menelik of Abyssinia. Some
one had told him that it was a manuscript of the twelfth or thirteenth century,
but to a student of the art of illumination it was clearly a modern copy of an
old manuscript. The hand lettering was excellent, but the decoration included
colors impossible to secure with the ancient pigments, and the parchment was
distinctly of modern origin.
“You are just the one to tell me about this,” Mr. Roosevelt exclaimed. “Is it
an original manuscript?”
He so obviously wished to receive an affirmative reply that I temporized
by asking if some letter of description had not come with it.
“Oh, yes,” he replied, immediately divining the occasion of my question
and showing his disappointment; “there was a missive, which is now in the
archives of the State Department. I saw a translation of it, but it is only one of
those banal expressions similar to any one of my own utterances, when I cable,
for instance, to my imperial brother, the Emperor of Austria, how touched and
moved I am to learn that his cousin, the lady with the ten names, has been
safely delivered of a child!”
The President was particularly interested in the subject of illustration, and
he showed me several examples, asking for a description of the various
processes. From that we passed on to a discussion of the varying demand
from the time when I first began to make books. I explained that the
development of the halftone plate and of the four-color process plates had
been practically within this period,—that prior to 1890 the excessive cost of
woodcuts, steel engravings, or lithography confined illustration to expensive
volumes. The halftone opened the way for profuse illustration at minimum
expense.
The President showed me an impression from one of Timothy Cole’s
marvelous woodcuts, and we agreed that the halftone had never taken the
place of any process that depends upon the hand for execution. The very
perfection to which the art of halftone reproduction has been carried is a
danger point in considering the permanence of its popularity. This does not
apply to its use in newspapers, but in reproducing with such slavish fidelity
photographs of objects perpetuated in books of permanent value. It seemed
paradoxical to say that the nearer perfection an art attains the less interesting it
becomes, because the very variation incidental to hand work in any art is what
relieves the monotony of that perfection attained through mechanical means.
Since then, a few leading engravers have demonstrated how the halftone may
be improved by hand work. This combination has opened up new possibilities
that guarantee its continued popularity.
With the tremendous increase in the cost of manufacturing books during
and since the World War, publishers found that by omitting illustrations from
their volumes they could come nearer to keeping the cost within the required
limits, so for a period illustrated volumes became limited in number
There is no question that the public loves pictures, and the development
during recent years of so-called newspapers from which the public gleans the
daily news by means of halftone illustrations, is, in a way, a reversion to the
time before the printing press, when the masses received their education
wholly through pictorial design. The popularity of moving pictures is another
evidence. I have always wished that this phase had developed at the time of
our discussion, for I am sure Mr. Roosevelt would have had some interesting
comments to make on its significance. I like to believe that this tendency will
correct itself, for, after all, the pictures which are most worth while are those
which we ourselves draw subconsciously from impressions made through
intellectual exploits
CHAPTER IV
The Lure of Illumination

IV
THE LURE OF ILLUMINATION
Sitting one day in the librarian’s office in the Laurenziana Library, in

Florence, the conversation turned upon the subject of illumination. Taking a
key from his pocket, my friend Guido Biagi unlocked one of the drawers in the
ancient wooden desk in front of him, and lifted from it a small, purple vellum
case, inlaid with jewels. Opening it carefully, he exposed a volume similarly
bound and similarly adorned. Then, as he turned the leaves, and the full
splendor of the masterpiece was spread out before me,—the marvelous
delicacy of design, the gorgeousness of color, the magnificence of decoration
and miniature,—I drew in my breath excitedly, and bent nearer to the
magnifying glass which was required in tracing the intricacy of the work.
This was a Book of Hours illuminated by Francesco d’Antonio del Cherico,
which had once belonged to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and was representative of the
best of the fifteenth-century Italian work (page 146). The hand letters were
written by Antonio Sinibaldi in humanistic characters upon the finest and
rarest parchment; the illumination, with its beaten gold and gorgeous colors,
was so close a representation of the jewels themselves as to make one almost
believe that the gems were inlaid upon the page! And it was the very volume
that had many times rested in the hands of Lorenzo the Magnificent, as it was
at that moment resting in mine!
For the first time the art of illumination became real to me,—not
something merely to be gazed at with respect and admiration, but an
expression of artistic accomplishment to be studied and understood, and made
a part of one’s life.
The underlying thought that has inspired illumination in books from its
very beginning is more interesting even than the splendid pages which
challenge one’s comprehension and almost pass beyond his power of
understanding. To the ancients, as we have seen, the rarest gems in all the
world were gems of thought. The book was the tangible and visible expression
of man’s intellect, worthy of the noblest presentation. These true lovers of
books engaged scribes to write the text in minium of rare brilliancy brought
from India or Spain, or in Byzantine ink of pure Oriental gold; they selected,
to write upon, the finest material possible,—sometimes nothing less than
virgin parchment, soft as velvet, made from the skins of still-born kids; they
employed the greatest artists of the day to draw decorations or to paint
miniatures; and they enclosed this glorified thought of man, now perpetuated
for all time, in a cover devised sometimes of tablets of beaten gold, or of ivory
inlaid with precious jewels (page 112).
CARVED IVORY BINDING

Jeweled with Rubies and Turquoises
From Psalter (12th Century). Brit. Mus. Eger. MS. 1139
(Reduced in size)
For centuries, this glorification was primarily bestowed upon religious

manuscripts, and illumination came to be associated with the Church, but by
the fourteenth century the art ceased to be confined to the cloister. Wealthy
patrons recognized that it offered too splendid a medium of expression to
permit limitation; and lay artists were employed to add their talents in
increasing the illuminated treasures of the world.
There would seem to be no reason why so satisfying an art as that of
illumination should not continue to be employed to make beautifully printed
books still more beautiful, yet even among those who really love and know
books there is a surprising lack of knowledge concerning this fascinating work.
The art of Raphael and Rubens has been a part of our every-day life and is
familiar to us; but the names of Francesco d’Antonio, Jean Foucquet, and Jean
Bourdichon have never become household words, and the masterpieces of the
illuminator’s art which stand to their credit seem almost shrouded in a hazy
and mysterious indefiniteness.
I have learned from my own experience that even fragmentary study
brings rich rewards:—the interest in discovering that instead of being merely
decorative, the art of illumination is as definitive in recording the temporary or
fashionable customs of various periods as history itself. There is a satisfaction
in learning to distinguish the characteristics of each well-defined school:—of
recognizing the fretted arcades and mosaics of church decoration in the
Romanesque style; the stained glass of the Gothic cathedrals in the schools of
England, France, Germany, or Italy; the love of flower cultivation in the work
of the Netherlandish artists; the echo of the skill of the goldsmith and
enameller in the French manuscripts; and the glory of the gem cutter in those
of the Italian Renaissance. There is the romance connected with each great
masterpiece as it passes from artist to patron, and then on down the centuries,
commemorating loyal devotion to saintly attributes; expressing fealty at
coronations or congratulations at Royal marriages; conveying expressions of
devotion and affection from noble lords and ladies, one to the other.
Illuminated volumes were not the playthings of the common people, and in
their peregrinations to their final resting places in libraries and museums, they
passed along a Royal road and became clothed with fascinating associations.
There was a time when I thought I knew enough about the various schools
to recognize the locality of origin or the approximate date of a manuscript, but
I soon learned my presumption. Illuminators of one country, particularly of
France, scattered themselves all over Europe, retaining the basic principles of
their own national style, yet adding to it something significant of the country
in which they worked. Of course, there are certain external evidences which
help. The vellum itself tells a story: if it is peculiarly white and fine, and highly
polished, the presumption is that it is Italian or dates earlier than the tenth
century; if very thin and soft, it was made from the skins of still-born calves or
kids, and is probably of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.
The colors, too, contribute their share. Each old-time artist ground or
mixed his own pigments,—red and blue, and less commonly yellow, green,
purple, black, and white. Certain shades are characteristic of certain periods.
The application of gold differs from time to time: in England, for instance,
gold powder was used until the twelfth century, after which date gold leaf is
beautifully laid on the sheet. The raised-gold letters and decorations were
made by building up with a peculiar clay, after the design had been drawn in
outline, over which the gold leaf was skilfully laid and burnished with an agate.
As the student applies himself to the subject, one clue leads him to
another, and he pursues his search with a fascination that soon becomes an
obsession. That chance acquaintance with Francesco d’Antonio inspired me to
become better acquainted with this art. It took me into different monasteries
and libraries, always following “the quest,” and lured me on to further seeking
by learning of new beauties for which to search, and of new examples to be
studied. Even as I write this, I am told that at Chantilly, in the Musée Condé,
the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry is the most beautiful example of the
French school. I have never seen it, and I now have a new objective on my
next visit to France!
In this quest, covering many years, I have come to single out certain
manuscripts as signifying to me certain interesting developments in the art
during its evolution, and I study them whenever the opportunity offers. It is of
these that I make a record here. Some might select other examples as better
illustrative from their own viewpoints; some might draw conclusions different
from mine from the same examples,—and we might all be right!
There is little for us to examine in our pilgrimage until the Emperor
Justinian, after the conflagration in the year 532, which completely wiped out
Constantinople with its magnificent monuments, reconstructed and rebuilt the
city. There are two copies of Virgil at the Vatican Library in Rome, to be sure,
which are earlier than that, and form links in the chain between illumination as
illustration and as book decoration; there is the Roman Calendar in the Imperial
Library at Vienna, in which for the first time is combined decoration with
illustration; there is the Ambrosiana Homer at Milan, of which an excellent
reproduction may be found in any large library,—made under the supervision
of Achille Ratti, before he became Pope Pius XI; there are the burnt fragments
of the Cottonian Genesis at the British Museum in London,—none more than
four inches square, and running down to one inch, some perforated with
holes, and almost obliterated, others still preserving the ancient colors of the
design, with the Greek letters clearly legible after sixteen centuries.
These are historical and interesting, but we are seeking beauty. In the
splendor of the rebirth of Constantinople, to which all the known world
contributed gold, and silver, and jewels, medieval illumination found its
beginning. Artists could now afford to send to the Far East and to the
southern shores of Europe for their costly materials. Brilliant minium came
from India and from Spain, lapis lazuli from Persia and Bokhara, and the
famous Byzantine gold ink was manufactured by the illuminators themselves
out of pure Oriental gold. The vellum was stained with rose and scarlet tints
and purple dyes, upon which the gold and silver inks contrasted with
marvelous brilliancy.
Gorgeousness was the fashion of the times in everything from architecture
to dress, and in the wealth and sumptuous materials at their command the
artists mistook splendor for beauty. The Byzantine figure work is based upon
models as rigid as those of the Egyptians, and shows little life or variety (opp.
page). Landscapes and trees are symbolic and fanciful. Buildings have no regard
for relative proportions, and are tinted merely as parts of the general color
scheme. The illuminators adhered so closely to mechanical rules that the
volumes lack even individuality.

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Computer Analysis of Images and

Patterns CAIP 2019 International

Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns 18th

Data Privacy Management Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain

Human Computer Interaction INTERACT 2019 17th IFIP TC

Human Computer Interaction INTERACT 2019 17th IFIP TC

Human Computer Interaction INTERACT 2019 17th IFIP TC

Business Process Management: 17th International

Software Engineering for Resilient Systems 11th

Communications in Computer and Information Science 1089

Editorial Board Members

Workshop Editors see next page

ISSN 1865-0929 ISSN 1865-0937 (electronic)

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Sara Colantonio Daniela Giorgi

Workshop on Visual Computing and Machine Learning

Workshop on Deep-Learning Based Computer Vision

September 2019 Mario Vento

Local Organizing Committee

Web and Publicity Chair

International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)

Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics,

A.I. Tech srl

Workshop on Visual Computing and Machine Learning

Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: Improving State-of-the-Art

A New Hybrid Method for Gland Segmentation in Histology Images . . . . . . 17

Residual Convolutional Neural Networks to Automatically Extract

Combining Convolutional Neural Networks for Multi-context

Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Through the Graph Fourier

Radiomic and Dosiomic Profiling of Paediatric Medulloblastoma

May Radiomic Data Predict Prostate Cancer Aggressiveness? . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Workshop on Deep-Learning Based Computer Vision for UAV (DL-UAV)

Training Deep Learning Models via Synthetic Data: Application

Computer Vision and Deep Learning-Enabled UAVs: Proposed Use

UAV Image Based Crop and Weed Distribution Estimation

An Integrated Precision Farming Application Based on 5G, UAV

Visual Communication with UAV: Use Cases and Achievements . . . . . . . . . 120

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

September 2019 Sara Colantonio

Sara Colantonio ISTI-CNR, Italy

Francesco Banterle ISTI-CNR, Italy

Mattia G. Bergomi Champalimaud Center for the Unknown,

Tecno Sistemi di Qualitá (TSQ) Srl, Livorno, Italy

Valentine Wargnier-Dauchelle(B) , Camille Simon-Chane, and Aymeric Histace

ETIS UMR CNRS 8051, Université Paris-Seine, Université de Cergy-Pontoise,

Abstract. Retinal blood vessels segmentation is an important step for

Keywords: Retinal blood vessels segmentation · Deep learning ·

2.1 Baseline: Birgui-Sekou Architecture

As a baseline, we choose an encoder-decoder architecture with competitive

loss(y, ỹ) = CE(y, ỹ) + α||y − ỹ||1 (1)

where y is the ground truth, ỹ is the prediction and CE is the cross-entropy. We

2.2 First Proposal: Green Channel Inputs

2.3 Second Proposal: U-Net Variation

Fig. 1. Architecture 2: U-Net type. Blue arrows: Convolution 3 × 3, ReLu, stride 1.

2.4 Third Proposal: Poisson Loss Function

3.3 Segmentation Mask Generation

3.4 Performance Evaluation Protocol

Fig. 4. Examples of CNN outputs before thresholding: (a, b, c) Baseline. (d, e, f)

Fig. 6. Examples of segmentation results compared to the human perception ground

Model Gold standard Human perception

Model AUC ACC SEN SPE DICE

4 Results and Discussion

5 Conclusion and Perspectives