MARK-AGE biomarkers of ageing

Many candidate biomarkers of human ageing have been proposed in the scientific literature but in all cases their variability in cross-sectional studies is considerable, and therefore no single measurement has proven to serve a useful marker to determine, on its own, biological age. A plausible reason for this is the intrinsic multi-causal and multi-system nature of the ageing process. The recently completed MARK-AGE study was a large-scale integrated project supported by the European Commission. The major aim of this project was to conduct a population study comprising about 3200 subjects in order to identify a set of biomarkers of ageing which, as a combination of parameters with appropriate weighting, would measure biological age better than any marker in isolation.

Shape from photographs:a multi-view stereo pipeline

Acquiring 3D shape from images is a classic problem in Computer Vision occupying researchers for at least 20 years. Only recently however have these ideas matured enough to provide highly accurate results. We present a complete algorithm to reconstruct 3D objects from images using the stereo correspondence cue. The technique can be described as a pipeline of four basic building blocks: camera calibration, image segmentation, photo-consistency estimation from images, and surface extraction from photo-consistency. In this Chapter we will put more emphasis on the latter two: namely how to extract geometric information from a set of photographs without explicit camera visibility, and how to combine different geometry estimates in an optimal way. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Practical 3D reconstruction based on photometric stereo

Photometric Stereo is a powerful image based 3D reconstruction technique that has recently been used to obtain very high quality reconstructions. However, in its classic form, Photometric Stereo suffers from two main limitations: Firstly, one needs to obtain images of the 3D scene under multiple different illuminations. As a result the 3D scene needs to remain static during illumination changes, which prohibits the reconstruction of deforming objects. Secondly, the images obtained must be from a single viewpoint. This leads to depth-map based 2.5 reconstructions, instead of full 3D surfaces. The aim of this Chapter is to show how these limitations can be alleviated, leading to the derivation of two practical 3D acquisition systems: The first one, based on the powerful Coloured Light Photometric Stereo method can be used to reconstruct moving objects such as cloth or human faces. The second, permits the complete 3D reconstruction of challenging objects such as porcelain vases. In addition to algorithmic details, the Chapter pays attention to practical issues such as setup calibration, detection and correction of self and cast shadows. We provide several evaluation experiments as well as reconstruction results. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.