Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six: Validation of Language Skills in the Jamaican Context

The Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS) is one of a few validated outcome measures related to children’s communicative participation. Additional validation of the FOCUS measure could address the paucity of validated outcomes-based measures available for assessing preschool-age children, particularly for those who are multilingual. The data collected for this study, with a representative sample of Jamaican Creole-English speaking children, extend the applicability of the FOCUS to a broader range of preschoolers and expand psychometric evidence for the FOCUS to a multilingual and understudied context.

Pixel-wise parallel calculation for depth from focus with adaptive focus measure

Depth-from-focus methods can estimate the depth from a set of images taken with different focus settings. We recently proposed a method that uses the relationship of the ratio between the luminance value of a target pixel and the mean value of the neighboring pixels. This relationship has a Poisson distribution. Despite its good performance, the method requires a large amount of memory and computation time because it needs to store focus measurement values for each depth and each window radius on a pixel-wise basis, and filtering to compute the mean value, which is performed twice, makes the relationship among neighboring pixels too strong to parallelize the pixel-wise processing. In this paper, we propose an approximate calculation method that can give almost the same results with a single time filtering operation and enables pixel-wise parallelization. This pixel-wise processing does not require the aforementioned focus measure values to be stored, which reduces the amount of memory. Additionally, utilizing the pixel-wise processing, we propose a method of determining the process window size that can improve noise tolerance and in depth estimation in texture-less regions. Through experiments, we show that our new method can better estimate depth values in a much shorter time.

Investigation of Shape-from-Focus Precision by Texture Frequency Analysis

This paper reports the precision of shape-from-focus (SFF) imaging according to the texture frequencies and window sizes of a focus measure. SFF is one of various depth measurement techniques for optical imaging, such as microscopy and endoscopy. SFF measures the depth of an object according to focus measure, which is generally computed with a fixed window. The window size affects the performance of SFF and should be adjusted for the texture of an object. In this study, we investigated the precision difference of SFF in texture frequencies and by window size. Two experiments were performed: precision validation in texture frequencies with a fixed window size, and precision validation in various window sizes related to pixel-cycle lengths. The first experimental results showed that a smaller window size could not provide a correct focus measure, and the second results showed that a window size that is approximately equal to a pixel-cycle length of the texture could provide better precision. These findings could potentially contribute to determining the appropriate window size of focus measure operation in shape-from-focus reconstruction.

NSCT and focus measure optimization based multi-focus image fusion

Getting a complete description of scene with all the relevant objects in focus is a hot research area in surveillance, medicine and machine vision applications. In this work, transform based fusion method called as NSCT-FMO, is introduced to integrate the image pairs having different focus features. The NSCT-FMO approach basically contains four steps. Initially, the NSCT is applied on the input images to acquire the approximation and detailed structural information. Then, the approximation sub band coefficients are merged by employing the novel Focus Measure Optimization (FMO) approach. Next, the detailed sub-images are combined using Phase Congruency (PC). Finally, an inverse NSCT operation is conducted on synthesized sub images to obtain the initial synthesized image. To optimize the initial fused image, an initial decision map is first constructed and morphological post-processing technique is applied to get the final map. With the help of resultant map, the final synthesized output is produced by the selection of focused pixels from input images. Simulation analysis show that the NSCT-FMO approach achieves fair results as compared to traditional MST based methods both in qualitative and quantitative assessments.