Patents by Inventor Ming-Chang Liu

Ming-Chang Liu has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • MULTI-LEVEL ENCODED DATA TRANSFER
    Publication number: 20140115375
    Abstract: Multi-level encoded data transfer is disclosed. 2n bits may be encoded in a data signal each half clock cycle. For example, four bits may be transferred each clock cycle. Prior to data transfer, each data line may have two bits ready to be encoded. The two bits may be encoded to one of four different data states. The clock may be divided into four intervals for each half clock cycle, with each interval corresponding to one of the four data states. The two bits may be encoded into the data signal based on the interval that corresponds to the data state. As one example, the data signal could transition during the interval that corresponds to the data state for the two bits. This encoding may be repeated for two other bits for the other half of the clock cycle. Thus, QDR or some other data rate may be achieved.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 24, 2012
    Publication date: April 24, 2014
    Applicant: SANDISK TECHNOLOGIES INC.
    Inventors: Michael Ming-Chang Liu, Darmin Jin
  • METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATIC HER2 SCORING OF TISSUE SAMPLES
    Publication number: 20140112568
    Abstract: Certain aspects of an apparatus and method for method and apparatus for automatic HER2 scoring of tissue samples may include for determining a cancer diagnosis score comprising identifying one or more nuclei in a slide image of a tissue sample, determine one or more membrane strengths in the slide image surrounding each of the one or more nuclei, classifying one or more cells, each corresponding to the one or more nuclei, in a class among a plurality of classes according to the one or more membrane strengths and determining a cancer diagnosis score based on a percentage of cells classified in each of the plurality of classes.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 24, 2012
    Publication date: April 24, 2014
    Applicant: SONY CORPORATION
    Inventors: MING-CHANG LIU, XIMIN ZHANG
  • METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATIC CANCER DIAGNOSIS SCORING OF TISSUE SAMPLES
    Publication number: 20140112569
    Abstract: Certain aspects of an apparatus and method for automatic ER/PR scoring of tissue samples may include for determining a cancer diagnosis score comprising identifying a positive stained nucleus in a slide image of the tissue sample, identifying a negative stained nucleus in the slide image, computing a proportion score based on number of the positive stained nucleus identified and number of the negative stained nucleus identified and determining the cancer diagnosis score based on the proportion.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 24, 2012
    Publication date: April 24, 2014
    Applicant: SONY CORPORATION
    Inventors: MING-CHANG LIU, XIMIN ZHANG
  • Region description and modeling for image subscene recognition
    Patent number: 8705866
    Abstract: A method and apparatus is described here that categorizes images by extracting regions and describing the regions with a 16-dimensional subscene feature vector, which is a concatenation of color, texture, and spatial feature vectors. By comparing the spatial feature vectors in images with similarly-obtained feature vectors in a Gaussian mixture based model pool (obtained in a subscene modeling phase), the images may be categorized (in a subscene recognition phase) with probabilities relating to each region or subscene. Higher probabilities are likelier correlations. The device may be a single or multiple core CPU, or parallelized vector processor for characterizing many images. The images may be photographs, videos, or video stills, without restriction. When used real-time, the method may be used for visual searching or sorting.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 7, 2010
    Date of Patent: April 22, 2014
    Assignee: Sony Corporation
    Inventors: Ximin Zhang, Ming-Chang Liu
  • METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR STAIN SEPARATION IN DIGITAL PATHOLOGY IMAGES
    Publication number: 20140023259
    Abstract: A method or apparatus for stain separation comprising transforming a digital image from a first color domain to an optical domain to form an optical domain image (ODI), identifying a plane containing two or more basis vector which contain the pixels of the ODI, determining a plurality of orthogonal vector within the identified plane, forming a histogram of the digital image represented by the orthogonal vectors and determining one or more final stain vectors by searching for candidate vectors in the plane that minimize a cost function of the histogram.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 19, 2012
    Publication date: January 23, 2014
    Applicant: SONY CORPORATION
    Inventors: MING-CHANG LIU, MARK ROBERTSON
  • METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR COMPRESSING Z-STACK MICROSCOPY IMAGES
    Publication number: 20140023283
    Abstract: A method and apparatus for compressing Z-stack microscopy images comprising compressing an all-focus image and depth map representation of an original Z-stack of images, computing a prediction residual as a difference between a simulated Z-stack, generated from the all-focus image and the depth-map, and the original Z-stack and concatenating the prediction residual to the compressed all-focus image and the depth map to produce a final compressed file.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 19, 2012
    Publication date: January 23, 2014
    Applicant: SONY CORPORATION
    Inventors: MING-CHANG LIU, MARK ROBERTSON
  • METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR IMPROVING DEPTH OF FIELD (DOF) IN MICROSCOPY
    Publication number: 20140022346
    Abstract: A method for improving depth for field (DOF) in microscopic imaging, the method comprising combining a sequence of images captured from different focal distances to form an all-focus image, comprising computing a focus measure at every pixel, finding the largest peaks at each position in the focus measure as multiple candidate values and blending the multiple candidates values according to the focus measure to determine the all-focus image.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 19, 2012
    Publication date: January 23, 2014
    Applicant: SONY CORPORATION
    Inventors: MING-CHANG LIU, MARK ROBERTSON
  • METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR SIMULATING DEPTH OF FIELD (DOF) IN MICROSCOPY
    Publication number: 20140022347
    Abstract: A method and apparatus for simulating depth of field (DOF) in microscopic imaging, the method comprising computing a blur quantity for each pixel of an all-focus image, performing point spread function operations on one or more regions of the all-focus image, computing intermediate and normalized integral images on the regions and determining an output pixel for the each pixel based on the intermediate and normalized integral images.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 19, 2012
    Publication date: January 23, 2014
    Applicant: SONY CORPORATION
    Inventors: MING-CHANG LIU, MARK ROBERTSON
  • METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR NAVIGATING STACKED MICROSCOPY IMAGES
    Publication number: 20140022236
    Abstract: A method for navigating images in microscopic imaging, the method comprising reducing dimensionality of an original sequence of images of a specimen for navigation using an all-focus image and providing a user interface to a user for navigating the original sequence of images and the all-focus image.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 19, 2012
    Publication date: January 23, 2014
    Applicant: SONY CORPORATION
    Inventors: MING-CHANG LIU, MARK ROBERTSON
  • METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR STAIN SEPARATION USING VECTOR ANALYSIS
    Publication number: 20140016853
    Abstract: A computer-implemented method and apparatus for stain separation of a pathology image using stain vector analysis comprising converting an original image into an optical domain image, performing stain vector analysis on the optical domain image to obtain one or more stain vectors, deconvoluting the vectors adaptively to produce one or more separated stain images.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 13, 2012
    Publication date: January 16, 2014
    Applicant: SONY CORPORATION
    Inventors: MING-CHANG LIU, XIMIN ZHANG
  • System and method for dynamic gesture recognition using geometric classification
    Patent number: 8620024
    Abstract: A gesture recognition system and method that inputs videos of a moving hand and outputs the recognized gesture states for the input sequence. In each image, the hand area is segmented from the background and used to estimate parameters of all five fingers. The system further classifies the hand image as one of the postures in the pre-defined database and applies a geometric classification algorithm to recognize the gesture. The system combines a skin color model with motion information to achieve real-time hand segmentation performance, and considers each dynamic gesture as a multi-dimensional volume and uses a geometric algorithm to classify each volume.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 17, 2010
    Date of Patent: December 31, 2013
    Assignee: Sony Corporation
    Inventors: Kuang-Man Huang, Ming-Chang Liu, Liangyin Yu
  • Automatic image alignment
    Patent number: 8605972
    Abstract: A method for automatically aligning images includes (a) determining initial correspondent point features between a first image and a second image, (b) creating a triangular meshes for the images from the initial correspondent point features within the images, and (c) refining point correspondence between the first and second images based on affine transformation estimation using the triangular meshes. The method may also include (d) creating refined triangular meshes for the images from the point correspondence refined in (c), and (e) determining coordinate alignment within the areas of pairs of correspondent triangles in the refined triangular meshes through interpolation of affine transformation on the pairs of correspondent triangles.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 2, 2012
    Date of Patent: December 10, 2013
    Assignee: Sony Corporation
    Inventors: Liangyin Yu, Ming-Chang Liu
  • Virtual level for a digital camera
    Patent number: 8588550
    Abstract: A method of and apparatus for generating a reference line or a virtual level enables tilt correction of an image. A user is able to utilize the reference line to see how an image should be oriented for the objects within the image to be level. The user is able to then correct the tilt of the image as desired using the reference line for assistance.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 4, 2010
    Date of Patent: November 19, 2013
    Assignee: Sony Corporation
    Inventor: Ming-Chang Liu
  • Motion parameter engine for true motion
    Patent number: 8553758
    Abstract: Local motion estimation is described herein. Each picture of a video is partitioned into blocks for the local motion estimation. An extended-block FFT is calculated for each block, where the extended-block denotes that a certain area around the block is also included for applying FFT. Extending the block for FFT helps to account for the motion of objects that are moving into or out of the block. Phase correlation is applied to attain a set of Motion Vector (MV) candidates for the blocks, and a cost function is evaluated for each MV. If no MV candidate produces a cost function below a pre-defined threshold, a hierarchical variable block matching search is applied and the process is repeated with blocks for finer resolution. Also, predictive MV candidates are used during the block matching search along with temporal constraints tracking to select an MV that yields the minimum cost function.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 2, 2007
    Date of Patent: October 8, 2013
    Assignees: Sony Corporation, Sony Electronics Inc.
    Inventors: Ming-Chang Liu, Peng Lin
  • AUTOMATED SYNCHRONIZED NAVIGATION SYSTEM FOR DIGITAL PATHOLOGY IMAGING
    Publication number: 20130243302
    Abstract: A method for synchronizing navigation in pathology stain images includes (a) downscaling the pathology stain images, (b) estimating rotation of the downscaled images, (c) aligning the downscaled images to generate aligned coordinates, and (d) transforming the aligned coordinates to original image coordinates in the pathology stain images to thereby generate alignment data. Also provided is a system for synchronized navigation in pathology stain images having original resolutions comprising a downscaler, a rotation estimator, an alignment module, and a coordinate transformer. The system may also include an image display system to display corresponding areas of the pathology stain images.
    Type: Application
    Filed: March 14, 2012
    Publication date: September 19, 2013
    Inventors: Ming-Chang LIU, Liangyin YU, Shigeatsu YOSHIOKA, Yoichi MIZUTANI, Masato KAJIMOTO
  • AUTOMATIC IMAGE ALIGNMENT
    Publication number: 20130230220
    Abstract: A method for automatically aligning images includes (a) determining initial correspondent point features between a first image and a second image, (b) creating a triangular meshes for the images from the initial correspondent point features within the images, and (c) refining point correspondence between the first and second images based on affine transformation estimation using the triangular meshes. The method may also include (d) creating refined triangular meshes for the images from the point correspondence refined in (c), and (e) determining coordinate alignment within the areas of pairs of correspondent triangles in the refined triangular meshes through interpolation of affine transformation on the pairs of correspondent triangles.
    Type: Application
    Filed: March 2, 2012
    Publication date: September 5, 2013
    Inventors: Liangyin YU, Ming-Chang Liu
  • System And Method For Effectively Performing An Image Categorization Procedure
    Publication number: 20130216138
    Abstract: A system for performing an image categorization procedure includes an image manager with a keypoint generator, a support region filter, an orientation filter, and a matching module. The keypoint generator computes initial descriptors for keypoints in a test image. The support region filter and the orientation filter perform respective filtering procedures upon the initial descriptors to produce filtered descriptors. The matching module compares the filtered descriptors to one or more database image sets for categorizing said test image. A processor of an electronic device typically controls the image manager to effectively perform the image categorization procedure.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 16, 2012
    Publication date: August 22, 2013
    Inventors: Liangyin Yu, Ming-Chang Liu, Kuang-Man Huang
  • System And Method For Effectively Performing A Scene Representation Procedure
    Publication number: 20130216134
    Abstract: A system for performing a scene representation procedure includes an image manager that processes source images from a given scene to define subscenes in the source images. The image manager creates an image understanding graph for each of the source images, and also creates a scene representation graph for each of the source images based upon the corresponding subscenes and certain image characteristics. The image manager further generates an integrated scene representation to represent all of the source images with a single representation. A processor of an electronic device controls the image manager to perform the scene representation procedure.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 17, 2012
    Publication date: August 22, 2013
    Inventors: Liangyin Yu, Ming-Chang Liu, Ximin Zhang
  • Geometric feature based image description and fast image retrieval
    Patent number: 8503777
    Abstract: An apparatus and method for processing pictures (images, graphics or video frames) for image representation and comparison on the basis of a geometric feature description built from histograms of pseudo-color saturation. The feature description can also include normalized centroid variance, as well as an intensity map. The descriptions allow various matching comparisons to be performed between an input image and a set of comparison images, such as to find matching (or mismatching, or other relationship) images. The comparison can be sped using staged comparisons, whereby an image failing one level of comparison need not be considered in subsequent phases. A set of efficient image feature descriptors are described for use in a fast image retrieval scheme, which is efficient for searching of images spanning different image types, rotations and scales.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 16, 2010
    Date of Patent: August 6, 2013
    Assignee: Sony Corporation
    Inventors: Ximin Zhang, Ming-Chang Liu
  • Shape description and modeling for image subscene recognition
    Patent number: 8503768
    Abstract: A method and apparatus is described here that categorizes images by extracting a subscene and describing the subscene with a top level feature vector and a division feature vector, which are descriptions of edge gradient classifications within rectangular bounding boxes. By filtering subscene feature vectors in images with a Gaussian mixture based model pool (obtained in a subscene modeling phase), the images may be categorized (in an subscene recognition phase) with probabilities relating to each subscene. Higher probabilities are likelier correlations. The device may be a single or multiple core CPU, or parallelized vector processor for characterizing many images. The images may be photographs, videos, or video stills, without restriction. When used real-time, the method may be used for visual searching or sorting.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 22, 2010
    Date of Patent: August 6, 2013
    Assignee: Sony Corporation
    Inventors: Ximin Zhang, Ming-Chang Liu