National Institute of Standards and Technology

Image Feature Extraction Software

Summary

The Feature Extraction Software is a flexible tool to extract and visualize a variety of image features from large images (Giga Bytes size). It supports over 30 distinct features that can be parametrized, which can be extracted from different user-defined regions of interest. It is implemented in the Java programming language and can run locally on a desktop or take advantage of parallel computing on a cluster (e.g. Hadoop). Figure 1 illustrates hexagon spatial regions partitioning stem cell colonies that are color-coded based on the extracted average intensity value.

Visualization of the feature extracted from stem cell colonies
Visualization of the feature extracted from stem cell colonies

Description

Different types of features are supported, such as:
Intensity (8 Features)
Mode, Mean, Standard Deviation, Skewness, Kurtosis, Fifth, Sixth moments, Entropy
Texture (15 Features)
Correlation, Energy, Contrast and Homogeneity, Texture Entropy and more
Spatial (10+ Features)
Area, Perimeter, Circularity, Orientation, Eccentricity, Distance from border, Centroid and more
Features can be extracted from different Regions Of Interests (ROI):
  • Squared grid
  • Hexagonal grid
  • Arbitrary shapes by providing a mask (e.g. colonies)
  • Masks can be sub-partitioned into squares or hexagons of a given size

Figure 2 illustrates the options for extracting image features with or without a mask, and with other options with a mask that enable feature extractions over various regions of interest.

Visualisation of some possible Region Of Interests to compute the features
Visualisation of some possible Region Of Interests to compute the features

The extracted features are outputted by default as CSV tables. When extracting features on a number of different images (e.g. evolution of colonies over time), the CSV tables can be merged into a single sqlite database, facilitating data-mining on the dataset.

Contact:

Peter Bajcsy
peter.bajcsy@nist.gov
Phone: 301.975.2958

Date created: April 10, 2014 | Last updated: