Copy-move forgery is one of the most common types of tampering for digital images. Detection methods generally use block-matching approaches, which first divide the image into overlapping blocks and then extract and compare features to find similar ones, or point-based approaches, in which relevant keypoints are extracted and matched to each other to find similar areas. In this paper, we present a very novel hybrid approach, which compares triangles rather than blocks, or single points. Interest points are extracted from the image, and objects are modeled as a set of connected triangles built onto these points. Triangles are matched according to their shapes (inner angles), their content (color information), and the local feature vectors extracted onto the vertices of the triangles. Our methods are designed to be robust to geometric transformations. Results are compared with a state-of-the-art block matching method and a point-based method. Furthermore, our data set is available for use by academic researchers.

Research in the medical imaging field using deep learning approaches has become progressively contingent. Scientific findings reveal that supervised deep learning methods’ performance heavily depends on training set size, which expert radiologists must manually annotate. The latter is quite a tiring and time-consuming task. Therefore, most of the freely accessible biomedical image datasets are small-sized. Furthermore, it is challenging to have big-sized medical image datasets due to privacy and legal issues. Consequently, not a small number of supervised deep learning models are prone to overfitting and cannot produce generalized output. One of the most popular methods to mitigate the issue above goes under the name of data augmentation. This technique helps increase training set size by utilizing various transformations and has been publicized to improve the model performance when tested on new data. This article surveyed different data augmentation techniques employed on mammogram images. The article aims to provide insights into basic and deep learning-based augmentation techniques.

Breast cancer is one of the most common death causes amongst women all over the world. Early detection of breast cancer plays a critical role in increasing the survival rate. Various imaging modalities, such as mammography, breast MRI, ultrasound and thermography, are used to detect breast cancer. Though there is a considerable success with mammography in biomedical imaging, detecting suspicious areas remains a challenge because, due to the manual examination and variations in shape, size, other mass morphological features, mammography accuracy changes with the density of the breast. Furthermore, going through the analysis of many mammograms per day can be a tedious task for radiologists and practitioners. One of the main objectives of biomedical imaging is to provide radiologists and practitioners with tools to help them identify all suspicious regions in a given image. Computer-aided mass detection in mammograms can serve as a second opinion tool to help radiologists avoid running into oversight errors. The scientific community has made much progress in this topic, and several approaches have been proposed along the way. Following a bottom-up narrative, this paper surveys different scientific methodologies and techniques to detect suspicious regions in mammograms spanning from methods based on low-level image features to the most recent novelties in AI-based approaches. Both theoretical and practical grounds are provided across the paper sections to highlight the pros and cons of different methodologies. The paper’s main scope is to let readers embark on a journey through a fully comprehensive description of techniques, strategies and datasets on the topic.

Background: Deep learning methods have become popular for their high-performance rate in the classification and detection of events in computer vision tasks. Transfer learning paradigm is widely adopted to apply pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) on medical domains overcoming the problem of the scarcity of public datasets. Some investigations to assess transfer learning knowledge inference abilities in the context of mammogram screening and possible combinations with unsupervised techniques are in progress. Methods: We propose a novel technique for the detection of suspicious regions in mammograms that consist of the combination of two approaches based on scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) keypoints and transfer learning with pretrained CNNs such as PyramidNet and AlexNet fine-tuned on digital mammograms generated by different mammography devices. Preprocessing, feature extraction, and selection steps characterize the SIFT-based method, while the deep learning network validates the candidate suspicious regions detected by the SIFT method. Results: The experiments conducted on both mini-MIAS dataset and our new public dataset Suspicious Region Detection on Mammogram from PP (SuReMaPP) of 384 digital mammograms exhibit high performances compared to several state-of-the-art methods. Our solution reaches 98% of sensitivity and 90% of specificity on SuReMaPP and 94% of sensitivity and 91% of specificity on mini-MIAS. Conclusions: The experimental sessions conducted so far prompt us to further investigate the powerfulness of transfer learning over different CNNs and possible combinations with unsupervised techniques. Transfer learning performances' accuracy may decrease when the training and testing images come out from mammography devices with different properties.