Dr Carole Janet Twining

Book

Current Interests

Publications

Wedding Album

MyCopy Version of the Book
If your university has full electronic access, our book is available online at Springer. You will then also have the option to purchase a grayscale printed version of the text, bound within a colour softcover, for only 24.95 (currency varies but price doesn't seem to!). Since I didn't include that many colour figures, this can be an affordable way to have your own copy of this book. Pop on a plastic reading cover, and it should stay unbattered for many years. Alternatively, if you're a bit persistent, you can download the pdf chapter by chapter, glue them all together, crop the margins off, and then have a copy of the book that you can view happily on your Kindle. Works for me!
Our Book
Statistical Models of Shape: Optimisation and Evaluation Rhodri Davies, Carole Twining and Chris Taylor
	Published by Springer. This book is intended to be a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the optimisation approach to groupwise correspondence for shapes, with particular focus on the Minimum Description Length approach. It provides an in-depth treatement of the whole field, from the basics of statistical shape models, to the most recent work on fluid-based regularization on the shape surface (IPMI 2007). As well as a complete mathematical treatment, it also includes extensive details on implementation, with pseudocode provided for the most important algorithms. The question of evaluating such models in the absence of ground truth data is also included. At around 300 pages, with 9 chapters and 2 mathematical appendices (you know me chaps, I had to include those!), this is intended to be THE work on the subject. Tired of trying to find all those old papers which contained bits and pieces of what we were doing, tired of trying to make sense of the historical development of our ideas -- you need worry no longer! Soon you'll be able to go to the Springer website, and order a nice copy for yourself . As a principal author, I can highly recommend it!

My Past: Full CV in pdf format, if you're really interested!

Current Position: Lecturer & Senior Scientist:
Joint position in the Schools of Computer Science, and ISBE (now known as Imaging Science) in the Medical School.

Former Post: Senior Scientist & RCUK Research Fellow in the Division of Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, University of Manchester.

Current Areas of Interest

Non-Rigid Registration : groupwise approaches to registration, representing diffeomorphic warps, constructing metrics on the diffeomorphism group and statistical analysis on curved spaces.

Differential Geometry: Differential geometry of both continuous and discrete spaces, as it relates to issues that arise in image and shape registration, and analysis of registrations. For instance, working with discrete representations of surfaces, all sorts of issues arise when you try to consider flow on such surfaces, or deforming such surfaces. Sometimes, just taking the continuum version, and approximating all the derivatives by finite-differences isn't enough. Hence we got involved in the trying to construct a differential geometry intrinsic to such surfaces.

Machine Learning:

Information-Theoretic Approaches to practically anything.....

Kernel Methods

Publications: also upcoming and papers in preparation.

2016

LATEST: Principal Autoparallel Analysis: Data Analysis in Weitzenbock Space. Joint work with Professor Stephen Marsland, Massey NZ.
Steve presented a talk on this at the recent ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning, New York, June 19th-24th 2016) workshop on
Geometry in Machine Learning (GIMLI). Slides available here.
A related paper is also available here.

2015

2014

2013

2012

In Preparation:
Data-Driven Evaluation of Non-Rigid Registration via Image Modelling: Does what it says on the tin, how to evaluate registration without ground-truth. Preliminary version of this work can be found HERE. We have done quite a bit more work since then, and it's turned out rather well. Watch this space.

Discrete Differential Geometry: The Non-Planar Quadrilateral Mesh.
Carole Twining and Stephen Marsland
Abstract:

We consider the problem of constructing a discrete differential geometry defined on non-planar quadrilateral meshes. While such meshes are used in applications such as computation for electromagnetism, fluid mechanics, and image analysis, the majority of analysis has focused on triangular meshes. We consider two approaches: discretizing the tensor calculus, and a discrete, mesh version of differential forms. Whilst these two approaches are equivalent in the continuum, we show that this is not true in the discrete case. Nevertheless, we show that it is possible to construct mesh versions of the Levi-Civita connection (and hence the tensorial covariant derivative and the associated covariant exterior derivative), the torsion, and the curvature. We show how discrete analogs of the usual vector integral theorems are constructed, in order that the appropriate conservation laws for physical theories can be cast in a form that holds exactly on the mesh, rather than only as approximations to a continuum limit. We demonstrate the success of our method by constructing a mesh version of classical electromagnetism, and discuss how our formalism could be used to deal with other physical models, such as fluids.

Phys. Rev. E 85, 066708 (2012) – Published June 27, 2012.

2011

Metrics, Connections, & Correspondence: The Setting for Groupwise Shape Analysis
Carole Twining, Stephen Marsland, and Chris Taylor
Abstract: This paper considers the general problem of the analysis of groups of shapes, and the issue of correspondence in that context. Many papers have been published on the topic of pairwise shape distances and pairwise shape similarity measures. However, most of these approaches make the implicit assumption that the methods developed for pairs of shapes are then sufficient when it comes to the problem of analyzing groups of shapes. In this paper, we consider the general case of pairwise and groupwise shape analysis within an infinite-dimensional Riemannian framework. We show how the issue of groupwise or pairwise shape correspondence is inextricably linked to the issue of the metric. We discuss how data-driven approaches can be used to find the optimum correspondence, and demonstrate how different choices of objective function lead to different groupwise correspondence, and why this matters in terms of groupwise modelling of shape.
Presented as an oral at EMMCVPR2011.
This paper looks at what correspondence means in the context of infinite-dimensional Riemannian geometry, and how the connection comes in. The take-home message is that you can't really just forget about the correspondence, or decide how to assign it beforehand, without having undesirable effects when it comes to analysing groups of shapes. It tries to make a link between our intuitive notions of shape similarity, shape difference, and shape change, and the concept of a connection in Riemannian geometry. Note the use of connection here, whereas the more usual focus is on the metric, then the Levi-Civita connection for that metric comes along for free. We are trying to say that the connection itself matters, because that is where the correspondence actually comes into the maths.
Proceedings published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, volume 6819,
Boykov, Y.; Kahl, F.; Lempitsky, V.; Schmidt, F.R. (Eds.), pages 399-412.

Carole J. Twining, Christopher J. Taylor, "Specificity: A Graph-Based Estimator of Divergence,"
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Volume 33, Issue 12, pages 2492 - 2505, 2011.
This is a much-expanded version of the preliminary work HERE. The earlier work just considered the very simplest case, we have expanded on this to do the interesting ones as well!

2009-2010

Rhodri H. Davies, Carole J. Twining, Tim Cootes, and Chris Taylor,
Building 3D Statistical Shape Models by Direct Optimisation,
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Accepted for publication, Pdf available HERE

Timothy F. Cootes, Carole J. Twining, Vladimir S. Petrović, Kolawole O. Babalola, and Christopher J. Taylor,
Computing Accurate Correspondences Across Groups of Images,
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Accepted for publication, Abstract available HERE

2008

Rhodri H. Davies, Carole J. Twining, and Chris Taylor,
Groupwise surface correspondence by optimization: Representation and regularization,
Medical Image Analysis, Volume 12, Issue 6, December 2008, Pages 787-796
Special issue on information processing in medical imaging (IPMI) 2007.

Carole J. Twining and Stephen Marsland
Constructing an atlas for the diffeomorphism group of a compact manifold with boundary, with application to the analysis of image registrations
Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Volume 222 , Issue 2 (December 2008), Pages 411-428.

Stephen Marsland, Carole J. Twining and Chris J. Taylor
A minimum description length objective function for groupwise non-rigid image registration
Image and Vision Computing, Volume 26, Issue 3, 3 March 2008, Pages 333-346

T.F. Cootes, C.J. Twining, K.O. Babalola and C.J. Taylor
Diffeomorphic statistical shape models
Image and Vision Computing, Volume 26, Issue 3, 3 March 2008, Pages 326-332.

2007

Carole J. Twining, Rhodri H. Davies, Christopher J. Taylor
Non-parametric Surface-Based Regularisation for Building Statistical Shape Models
Talk presented at IPMI 2007, Kerkrade, the Netherlands. LNCS 4584 Springer 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-73272-3, pages 738-750.

Rhodri Davies, Carole Twining, Tomos Williams, Chris Taylor
Group-wise Correspondence of Surfaces Using Non-parametric Regularisation and Shape Images
Proceedings of ISBI 2007

Vladimir Petrovic, Tim Cootes, Carole Twining, Chris Taylor
Simultaneous registration, segmentation and modelling of structure in groups of medical images
Proceedings of ISBI 2007

2006

Carole Twining and Chris Taylor
Specificity as a Graph-Based Estimator of Cross-Entropy
Proceedings of BMVC 2006, Edinburgh, Volume 2, page 459-468. Here.

V. S. Petrovic, T. F. Cootes, C. J. Twining and C. Taylor,
Automatic Framework for Medical Image Registration, Segmentation and Modeling
Proceedings of Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA), 2006. Vol. 2, pp.141-5.

R. S. Schestowitz, C. J. Twining, V. S. Petrovic, T. Cootes, B. Crum and C. Taylor,
Non-Rigid Registration Assessment Without Ground Truth,
Proceedings of Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA), 2006. Vol. 2, pp.151-5.

C. J. Twining, T. F. Cootes, S. Marsland, V. S. Petrovic, R. S. Schestowitz and C.J. Taylor,
Information-Theoretic Unification of Groupwise Non-Rigid Registration and Model Building,
Proceedings of Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA), 2006. Vol. 2, pp.226-230.

Davies, R.H.; Twining, C.J.; Taylor, C.J.;
Consistent spherical parameterisation for statistical shape modelling
Proceedings of. IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2006.

R. Schestowitz, C. Twining, T. Cootes, V. Petrovic, C. Taylor, W. Crum,
Assessing the Accuracy of Non-Rigid Registration With and Without Ground Truth,
Proceedings of. IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2006.

2005

Carole J. Twining, Tim Cootes, Stephen Marsland, Vladimir Petrovic, Roy Schestowitz, and Chris J. Taylor
A Unified Information-Theoretic Approach to Groupwise Non-Rigid Registration and Model Building
Presented at IPMI 2005

Carole Twining, Stephen Marsland, and Chris Taylor
Groupwise non-rigid registration of medical images: the minimum-description length approach
Presented at the European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ECMTB) 2005.

T.F. Cootes, C.J. Twining, V.Petrovic, R.Schestowitz and C.J. Taylor,
Groupwise Construction of Appearance Models using Piece-wise Affine Deformations,
Proceedings of British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2005, vol. 2, pp.879-888.

2004

Carole J. Twining, Stephen Marsland, and Chris Taylor
Groupwise Non-Rigid Registration: The Minimum Description Length Approach
Presented at BMVC 2004.

Tim Cootes, Carole Twining, and Chris Taylor
Diffeomorphic Statistical Shape Models
Presented at BMVC 2004.

Carole Twining and Stephen Marsland
A Unified Information-Theoretic Approach to the Correspondence Problem in Image Registration
International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Cambridge, U.K. 2004.

Tim Cootes, Stephen Marsland, Carole Twining, Kate Smith, and Chris Taylor
Groupwise Diffeomorphic Non-Rigid Registration for Automatic Model Building
Presented at European Conference on Computer Vision, Prague, 2004.

Stephen Marsland and Carole Twining,
Spline Interpolants and the Registration & Analysis of Medical Images,
Talk presented in the mini-symposium: MS2:Metrics, Geodesics, and Large Deformation Diffeomorphisms in (Medical) Image Analysis
at the SIAM Conference in Imaging Science (IS04), Salt Lake City, 2004.

Stephen Marsland and Carole Twining
Constructing Diffeomorphic Representations for the Groupwise Analysis of Non-Rigid Registrations of Medical Images
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Volume 23, Issue 8, Aug. 2004 Page(s):1006 - 1020.

2003

Stephen Marsland, Carole Twining and Chris Taylor
Groupwise Non-Rigid Registration using Polyharmonic Clamped-Plate Splines
Presented at MICCAI 2003, Montreal, Canada, 15th-18th Novenber 2003.
Proceedings of MICCAI 2003, Part II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), volume 2879, pages 771-779, Springer-Verlag, 2003.

Carole Twining and Stephen Marsland
Constructing Diffeomorphic Representations of Non-Rigid Registrations of Medical Images
Talk presented at Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI) , Ambleside 20th-25th July, 2003.
Runner-Up for the Francois Erbsmann Prize
Proceedings of Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI 2003) ,
Lecture Notes In Computer Science (LNCS) 2732, eds. C. Taylor and J. A. Noble, Springer, pages 413-425, 2003.

Stephen Marsland and Carole Twining
Constructing Data-Driven Optimal Representations for Iterative Pairwise Non-Rigid Registration
Talk presented at the Second International Workshop on Biomedical Image Registration (WBIR), Philadelphia, June 23th-24th, 2003.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 2717, eds. J. C. Gee, J. B. Antoine Maintz and M. W. Vannier, pages 50-60, Springer, 2003.

Carole Twining and Stephen Marsland
Groupwise and Local Analysis of Image Warps
Talk presented at the 22nd Leeds Annual Statistics Workshop, 8th-10th July, Leeds 2003.

Carole Twining and Stephen Marsland
A Non-Euclidean Metric for the Classification of Variations in Medical Images
Talk presented at Medical Image Understanding and Analysis, Sheffield, 10th-11th July, 2003.

2002

Carole Twining, Stephen Marsland and Chris Taylor. Measuring Geodesic Distances on the Space of Bounded Diffeomorphisms . Talk presented at BMVC2002 , the British Machine Vision Conference, Cardiff, 2nd-5th September 2002.

Stephen Marsland and Carole Twining. Clamped-Plate Splines and the Optimal Flow of Bounded Diffeomorphisms. Talk presented at LASR2002 , the Leeds Annual Statistics Research Workshop, Leeds, 3rd-5th July 2002.

Previous Research Project: Characterising Behavioural Phenotypes Using Automated Image Analysis.

This work was funded by a joint BBSRC/EPSRC grant under the Bioinformatics Initiative.

This aim of this project is to apply the model-based methods of image analysis (ASM/AAM) developed in the Wolfson Unit to the problem of behavioural characterisation of animals in image sequences, such as the rat in the above image. Click HERE for more details.

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Miscellaneous Other Publications

Carole Twining, Stephen Marsland and Chris Taylor. Measuring Geodesic Distances on the Space of Bounded Diffeomorphisms . To be presented at BMVC2002 , the British Machine Vision Conference, Cardiff, 2nd-5th September 2002.

Davies, Rh.H., C.J. Twining, T.F. Cootes, J. C. Waterton and C.J. Taylor. Constructing Optimal 3D Statistical Shape Models. To appear in Medical Image Analysis and Understanding (MIUA). 2002.

Davies, Rh.H., T.F. Cootes, C.J. Twining, and C.J. Taylor. Constructing Optimal Statistical Shape Models for Automatic Image Segmentation in EPSRC PREP 2002.

Davies, Rh.H., C.J. Twining, P. Daniel Allen, T.F. Cootes, and C.J. Taylor. Building Optimal 2D Statistical Shape Models . Invited paper. Image and Vision Computing (IVC), In Press.

Davies, Rh.H., C.J. Twining, T.F. Cootes, J. C. Waterton and C.J. Taylor. 3D Statistical Shape Models Using Direct Optimisation of Description Length . Presentation at 7th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV). vol 3, p3-21, 2002.
Awarded "Best Paper" prize.

Davies, Rh.H., T.F. Cootes, C.J. Twining, J. C. Waterton and C.J. Taylor. 3D Statistical Shape Models for Automatic Segmentation of MR Images . in 10th Scientific Meeting and Exhibition of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM). 2002.

Rh. Davies, C. J. Twining, T. F. Cootes, J. C. Waterton and C. J. Taylor, A Minimum Description Length Approach to Statistical Shape Modelling, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging , IPMI 2001 Special Issue.

Carole J. Twining and Chris J. Taylor The Use of Kernel Principal Component Analysis to Model Data Distributions,
To appear in Pattern Recognition Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2003, Pages 217-227.

Rhodri H. Davies, Tim F. Cootes, Carole J. Twining and Chris J. Taylor An Information Theoretic Approach to Statistical Shape Modelling,
Talk at BMVC 2001, September 10th-13th, University of Manchester.
Awarded the Image Metrics prize for an outstanding contribution to model based computer-vision

C. J. Twining and C. J. Taylor Kernel Principal Component Analysis and the construction of non-linear Active Shape Models,
Talk at BMVC 2001, September 10th-13th, University of Manchester.

C. J. Twining, C. J. Taylor and P. Courtney Robust Tracking and Posture Description for Laboratory Rodents using Active Shape Models,
'Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers' , Measuring Behavior Special Issue, Volume: 33 Number: 3 Page: 381 – 391, August 2001.

C. Twining, C. Taylor, P. Courtney and C. Dourish Characterising Behavioural Phenotypes using Automated Image Analysis,
Talk given at Measuring Behavior 2000 , Nijmegen.

Old Stuff

P-M. Binder, D. Y. K. Ko, A. L. Owczarek and C. J. Twining Ordered Cellular Automata in One Dimension J. Physique I 3 (1993) p21-28.

C. J. Twining and P-M. Binder Enumeration of Limit Cycles in Non-Cylindrical Cellular Automata J. Stat. Phys. 66 (1992) p 385-401.

C. J. Twining The Limiting Behaviour of Non-Cylindrical ELementary Cellular Automata Complex Systems 6 No. 5 (1992) p 417. Link to Abstract

P-M. Binder, C. J. Twining and D. Sherrington Phase-Space Study of Bistable Cellular Automata Complex Systems 5 No. 2 (1991) p 127-137. Link to Abstract

C. J. Twining Low-Temperature Expansion of the Planar Spin Model J.Phys. A Math. Gen. 21 (1988) p 1735-1738.

Kernel Principal Component Analysis:

For a brief introduction to Kernel PCA, and details of some of my current work on non-linear ASMs, click HERE.

Worm Dataset

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Reference Links:

Notices of the American Mathematical Society. http://www.ams.org/notices/	For those weirdoes (like me) who actually like mathematics.
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/Seis.html	Numbers, numbers everywhere......
Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/letters/P.html	A great reference if you don't know your beta function from your gamma function.
Eric's Treasure Troves of Science. http://www.treasure-troves.com/	Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, The Game of Life.....
Mathematical Programming Glossary by Harvey J. Greenberg. http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~hgreenbe/glossary/glossary.html	Useful stuff
The Data Analysis BriefBook: Covers statistics, computing, analysis and related fields. A useful reference. http://www.cern.ch/Physics/DataAnalysis/BriefBook	Trust good 'ole CERN to give us all that stats stuff.
Kalman Filter: A good page of links and resources. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/kalman/index.html	If you don't know what one is, then you're not one of us.....
Support Vector Machines: Includes a MATLAB toolbox, tutorials and links. http://www.isis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/resources/svminfo/	This stuff is really cool and sexy.....
Science, engineering and medical research: Online resources and news. http://www.scicentral.com/index.html	What gene did they find today....