For the last 13 years, the imaging team from the GREYC (Caen Research Group in Computer Science, Imaging, Automation and Instrumentation - joint CNRS - ENSICAEN - UCBN research group) has been developing a vast range of fundamental skills in image analysis and processing, particularly in the medical field. The team’s fusion, last year, with the Vision et Analyse d’Image (Image Vision and Analysis) team, present in both Cherbourg and Saint-Lô, has reinforced its move towards other fields of application: security, multimedia, heritage conservation… Encounter.

Cyceron:: Novel Interaction | Working side by side with young and innovative businesses | First prize | A small team with big ideas in Manche | Take note

Cyceron : « Novel interaction »

For the last two years, the University Professor Alain Buisson’s psychology team from Cyceron, together with the GREYC image team, have been working together on the morphological analysis of affected neurons in neurodegenerative pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease. This inaugural partnership is the result of a request for multidisciplinary proposals launched by the CNRS and the Regional Council and for which they awarded: a BDI - bourse de doctorat pour ingénieur (engineering doctoral grant). “Here, in biology,” explains Alain Buisson, “we have developed techniques enabling us to obtain images of fluorescent living cells, which we can then use to conduct morphological studies, the difficulty being that with today’s microscopes, we have such massive degree enlargement that analysing images becomes extremely painstaking and time-consuming.” The psychology team leader consequently has asked for help from the GREYC team, renowned for its experience in computer-based image processing and analysis, particularly in the medical field. “They immediately took the problem in hand with remarkable efficiency,” highlights Alain Buisson. The project, which the two teams developed together, is also the subject of a thesis for which the ENSICAEN engineer François-Xavier Dupé is studying, under supervision by Luc Brun, director of the GREYC image team. It involves the development of a software package capable of automatically correcting the imperfections in images acquired by biologists, of extracting structures, measuring them and reconstructing them on CD images in order to obtain the most precise and coherent information possible.
The thesis will continue for a further year, but has already led to several publications by its author, which have received acclaim from the scientific community. “In order for a collaborative project like ours to work well,” explains Alain Buisson, “each laboratory must benefit in terms of research. We then need to endeavour to speak the same language, in our case between biologists and mathematicians. And, of course, the question of funding is essential. So when opportunities arise, it’s important to seize them.”
Alain Buisson / Cyceron
Tel: 02 31 47 01 05
Website: www.cyceron.fr

Working side by side with young and innovative businesses
The GREYC Image team also offers support and coaching in terms of research, development and even creation for young and innovative businesses. The laboratory’s flagship: Quadraxis, a 3D software publisher for the animated film and packaging industries among others, set up 3 years ago in Cherbourg-Octeville. “We had recruited an engineer to perfect the heart of the system,” recalls Marinette Revenu. This engineer then joined the company managed by Olivier Marre, a cinema and synthetic image enthusiast and former student from the renowned Gobelins imaging school. “It’s motivating for our young researchers to see their work resulting in business creation,” continues Marinette Revenu. The company StarNav, created in Caen in 2007, has also benefited from support from the GREYC. “We provided them with a trainee student to help them to perfect a system enabling a text to be keyed in via the user’s eye movements.” A further partnership with Zero to One Technology should soon result in the development of a software package to assess the quality of exchange between sales representatives and their clients.
Photo caption: The GREYC image team’s flagship: Quadraxis, managed by Olivier Marre, a specialist in 3D software publishing, based in Cherbourg-Octeville.

First prize
The ADER first prize was jointly awarded in 2008 to the GRECAN’s quantitative histo-imaging team (University of Caen / François Baclesse Cancer Centre); the GREYC’s image team, in partnership with Vision and Image Analysis (from its independent days) and the companies ELDIM and ADCIS for their work on biological medical imaging. This prize rewards the exemplary relationship between a research laboratory or team of researchers and a company (private or public legal entity with a commercial, industrial or service activity, or a public authority or establishment).

A small team with big ideas in Manche
Early 2007, the Vision and Image Analysis team, coordinated by Abderrahim El Moataz, moved from the LUSAC (Cherbourg University Laboratory for Applied Sciences) to join the GREYC. The team has premises and equipment on both of the Cherbourg IUT’s sites, where several projects and partnerships with businesses have emerged and developed.
In its Manche site, the GREYC image team will soon boast 2 professors, including Abderrahim El Moataz, 5 lecturers [one with an Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (Accreditation to Supervise Research)] from Caen University, four PhD students funded by the association Cœur et Cancer and the Lower Normandy Regional Council, together with an engineer and a post-doctoral researcher working on two specific projects. The first - the product of ten years of research work initiated by the Louis Pasteur Hospital in Cherbourg, involves the industrialisation of software components for histopathology in partnership with the company Adcis. The second, baptised FOGRIMMI (for Fouille de grandes images microscopiques - searching in large microscopic images) has been granted funding from the ANR (French National Research Agency). Coordinated by Olivier Lezoray, a member of the Manche-based image team, the project reunites the GREYC, the GRECAN (Caen) and the Universities of Poitiers, Bordeaux, Lyon and Savoie. This project also relies on an Aperio scanner purchased in 2006, funded by the Cherbourg Urban Community and the François Baclesse Cancer Centre and located in the Cherbourg-Manche University Technical Institute’s Saint-Lô site. “This scanner enables biologists and physicians to obtain images containing data from an entire slide,” explains Olivier Lezoray, lecturer-researcher at Caen University. “”The image team’s work consists in processing this mass of data, which can reach 30Gb! We are currently developing tools to help doctors in their decision-making via automatic cell counting tools for example. The project is due for completion in 2010, however it has already yielded results in terms of image processing and visualisation.” Two teams, from the United States and Belgium are also involved in the project.
More recently, the purchase, last October, of a 3D digitisation scanner offers promising prospects for new applications in the field of heritage conservation, virtual reality and reverse engineering which consists in modelling objects from images. Several companies have already expressed an interest in this new machine, following the example of Quadraxis (1), based in Cherbourg-Octeville, for an animated film project, along with Euridis, an engineering design office specialised in 3D animation.
The team has developed many partnerships with businesses based locally or further afield: dynamic cartography for internet (CHWeb Design in Cherbourg), image analysis and improvement via mobile phones (Logipix), indexing of scanned documents (SWT), corrosion by image analysis (Cogema-Areva), object and document authentication (Prooftag)..
“National and international renown”
July 2008. The International Conference on Image and Signal Processing reunited 150 delegates (both scientific and industrial) in Cherbourg-Octeville. The event, which was organised by the GREYC’s Manche-based image team, with support from a number of partners (UCBN, ENSICAEN, CNRS…) led to the publication of a scientific paper by the specialised publisher Springer. “This type of event is a genuine opportunity for us to promote the region’s scientific, but also cultural image, hence encouraging young scientists to come and join us,” highlights the university professor Abderrahim El Moataz. Concurrently, on the 1st of July, the director of the Manche site organised the very first open day devoted to digital culture in Cherbourg. “The aim was to invite renowned specialists for them to explain to the public, in simple terms, what their work is all about. It was the opportunity for many to discover that we exist.”
This one-day event, which will also result in the publication of a book in 2009, was one of the workshops comprising the Assises nationales du Numérique which took place from last May to July and will form one of the bases of the Digital Plan 2012.
Two of the Manche site’s members were finally rewarded with prizes for the best student articles:
Sébastien Bougleux (discrete regularisation for image and mesh processing) during the SSVM’2007 conference, and Vinh Thong Ta (Partial Difference Equations on Graphs for Mathematical Morphology Operators over Images and Manifolds) which was awarded the IBM student paper prize at the ICIP 2008, one of the leading conferences in the field of imaging, which took place in San Diego (California) in October.
“You can be externally located and in small numbers, yet still conduct high level research work,” Abderrhaim El Moataz is pleased to remind us. QED.
(1) see previous pages
Pr Abderrahim El Moataz
Tel: 06 76 08 40 06
Website: www .ensicaen.fr
Olivier Lezoray
Tel: 02 31 45 27 06
Website: www.unicaen.fr

Take note
The GREYC image team in a few words and figures:
Staff
- permanent staff of 19 (4 professors, 13 university lecturers and 2 research executives)
- 15 PhD students
Three research supervisory bodies
University of Caen - Lower Normandy, ENSICAEN and the CNRS
Three research sites
(map: Caen, Saint-Lô, Cherbourg)
A variety of partnerships
• Medical:
Anatomic MRI / CHU Caen
Functional imaging / Cyceron
MRI and diffusion / Cyceron, CHU Caen
Cellular microscopy imaging / François Baclesse Cancer Centre / GRECAN
Cardiac ultrasound / CHU Caen
Cardiac MRI / CHU Caen, GE Healthcare
Cranial radiography / TCI / Orthodentist
EEG / Cyceron
• Multimedia
Video analysis - segmentation/Philips Caen, NXP
Stylised rendering for animated films / Quadraxis, INT Evry
Following boats on videos / ATERMES
Image indexing / Quero project
• Security
Biometrics: hand and face / France Telecom R&D
Securing audio and video contents / France Telecom R&D (RAFFUT project)
Astronomical imaging / CEA (Nuclear Energy Commission) / Saclay
• Non-destructive control / IFP - Institut Français du Pétrole (French Petroleum Institute)
Also involved in training
- IUT SRC (communicaiton services and networks) (IUT Cherbourg-Manche, Saint-Lô site)
- Professional Degrees in Image Processing and Analysis (University of Caen - Lower Normandy)
- Professional Degree (IUT Cherbourg-Manche, Saint-Lô site)
- Science Degree L1, L2 (IUT Cherbourg and University of Caen - Lower Normandy)
- 2 Research Masters Degrees: LID (Language Image and Document) and AMI (Information Algorithms and Models ) at the University of Caen - Lower Normandy
- 1 Professional Masters Degree (Networks, Documentation and Image) (University of Caen - Lower Normandy)
- Engineering training, Specialising in Computer Science, Image and multimedia at ENSICAEN.

It’s the story of a small team, founded in the 1980s by Professor Daniel Bloyet, and reuniting 3 to 4 researchers, each of them equally enthusiastic about image processing and analysis. “Our activities were initially concentrated on the authentication of signatures and visual control for industrial applications, such as robots developed in partnership with RVI (Renault Trucks),” recalls Marinette Revenu, photo in hand. “Concurrently, we started to work on research projects in association with the François Baclesse Cancer Centre.” In the 1990s, the medical imaging boom generated new needs and particularly specialised skills in the field.

A vast range of skills

1995. The GREYC is the product of the fusion of two teams, one of them specialising in instrumental imaging, medical imaging in particular, and the other working on computer-assisted visualisation and artificial intelligence. This joint CNRS-UCBN-ENSICAEN research unit is one of Lower Normandy’s largest research laboratories, currently hosting eight teams, each with specific research themes, and a staff of 190. Among the eight teams, there is the imaging team, coordinated since its early days by Marinette Revenu, who was replaced early this year by Luc Brun. Today, the team has a permanent staff of 19, including 4 professors, 13 university lecturers, 2 research executives and 15 PhD students. A staff which was to grow in 2007 with the arrival of the Vision and Image Analysis team (UCBN), which nevertheless has maintained the same premises, its own equipment and part of its research work at the Cherbourg-Octeville IUT and Saint-Lô IUT (University Technical Institutes) (see following pages).
With researchers and lecturer-researchers from diverse backgrounds (mathematics, computer science, physics, artificial intelligence), the team’s skills cover a wide and varied range of fields: from image improvement to reconstruction, and from pattern recognition and extraction to data indexing. “A skill which have reinforce since the arrival of Frédéric Jurie, a lecturer-researcher from Caen University, specialising in category level object segmentation.” Explains Luc Brun.

Expertise in medical imaging

Most of the team’s skills were developed following increasing demand in the field of medical imaging, on which the greater part of the team’s research efforts are concentrated, be it in Caen or in Cherbourg-Octeville and Saint-Lô. Luc Brun is currently supervising two doctoral theses in partnership with the Cyceron biomedical platform in Caen. One of them focuses on measuring neuronal networks in the human brain; the other on the morphological analysis of neurons affected during neurodegenerative pathologies (see boxed article). Two projects which, in due course, should improve medical diagnosis, particularly in the case of Alzheimer’s disease, of which 400,000 cases have been declared in France.
Two further theses are also currently underway, in partnership with the Caen University Hospital’s cardiology department and General Electrics. “The aim is to precisely monitor heart movements via MRI or ultrasound images to enable earlier detection of possible failure,” explains Marinette Revenu. Adding, “we have tried to develop a tool that can adapt to new acquisition equipment.“
In the field of medical imaging the GREYC team is also working on projects currently underway at the François Baclesse Cancer Centre and the GRECAN, in the field of image analysis applied to screening, and the diagnosis and prognosis of different cancers via approaches involving wide-field image analysis and processing. “This research, which is conducted in close collaboration with the centre’s medical staff, is progressing auspiciously,” notes Pascal Gauduchon, professor at Caen University and Director of the GRECAN. “Transfer towards clinical application is already underway, as is transfer towards industrial development.”

An enlarged field of action

“The team’s acquired skills in the fundamental fields of image analysis and processing enable our researchers to easily adapt to new research themes or fields of application,” highlights Luc Brun. Hence, two of the team members, David Tschumperlé and Jalal Fadili, recently had the opportunity to work with the Institut Français du Pétrole (French Petroleum Institute) on the extraction of wire structures using X-ray images in order to prevent possible breakdown within oil transport networks.
Last summer, the ANR (French National Research Agency) certified the project entitled “Quiavu”. Conducted in collaboration with the GREYC, Thalès Security System, the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie Nationale, together with the University of Poitiers, the project involves the control and improvement of images filmed by surveillance cameras.
The GREYC team is also one of the partners in a project initiated by France Telecom, funded by the ANR, and focusing on telecommunications security. The aim is to offer alternatives to passwords, which are deemed to be of little efficacy. In concrete terms, the aim is to identify solutions enabling a cryptographic key to be regenerated for a given person, based on his/her biometric data, without resorting to the storage of any personal information. This key could also be used, for example, for individual authentication, for signing messages or for ciphering operations. The image team is involved in a total of 9 ANR-certified projects.
And the team’s research also concerns the creation of software and data libraries, which are available to the general public via its website (1).

Tomorrow’s imaging?

In terms of medical imaging, advances in new image acquisition tools presage a number of new research projects, following the example of the ANR project entitled FOGRIMMI, coordinated by a lecturer-researcher from the GREYC image team located in Manche (see below).
“We have also expressed our interest and promoted our associated skills with regard to a recent regional reflection on nuclear imaging,” adds Luc Brun. New research prospects are also being considered in the field of electronic documents, a field in which several GREYC teams have transversal skills. “Finally, we also have skills which could be of interest to the Mov’eo automotive competitiveness cluster, for collision detection for example,” he adds. Basically, the GREYC team is ready and willing to get involved in any field where images need to be improved or where information needs to be extracted from them.

(1) www.greyc.ensican.fr/EquipeImage

Luc Brun / in charge of the image team
Tel: 02 31 45 27 01
Website: GREYC / Equipe Image

Marinette Revenu
Tel: 02 31 45 27 02

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