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Showing papers on "Image processing published in 2011"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper investigates two fundamental problems in computer vision: contour detection and image segmentation and presents state-of-the-art algorithms for both of these tasks.
Abstract: This paper investigates two fundamental problems in computer vision: contour detection and image segmentation. We present state-of-the-art algorithms for both of these tasks. Our contour detector combines multiple local cues into a globalization framework based on spectral clustering. Our segmentation algorithm consists of generic machinery for transforming the output of any contour detector into a hierarchical region tree. In this manner, we reduce the problem of image segmentation to that of contour detection. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that both our contour detection and segmentation methods significantly outperform competing algorithms. The automatically generated hierarchical segmentations can be interactively refined by user-specified annotations. Computation at multiple image resolutions provides a means of coupling our system to recognition applications.

5,068 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A novel feature similarity (FSIM) index for full reference IQA is proposed based on the fact that human visual system (HVS) understands an image mainly according to its low-level features.
Abstract: Image quality assessment (IQA) aims to use computational models to measure the image quality consistently with subjective evaluations. The well-known structural similarity index brings IQA from pixel- to structure-based stage. In this paper, a novel feature similarity (FSIM) index for full reference IQA is proposed based on the fact that human visual system (HVS) understands an image mainly according to its low-level features. Specifically, the phase congruency (PC), which is a dimensionless measure of the significance of a local structure, is used as the primary feature in FSIM. Considering that PC is contrast invariant while the contrast information does affect HVS' perception of image quality, the image gradient magnitude (GM) is employed as the secondary feature in FSIM. PC and GM play complementary roles in characterizing the image local quality. After obtaining the local quality map, we use PC again as a weighting function to derive a single quality score. Extensive experiments performed on six benchmark IQA databases demonstrate that FSIM can achieve much higher consistency with the subjective evaluations than state-of-the-art IQA metrics.

4,028 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
20 Jun 2011
TL;DR: This work proposes a regional contrast based saliency extraction algorithm, which simultaneously evaluates global contrast differences and spatial coherence, and consistently outperformed existing saliency detection methods.
Abstract: Automatic estimation of salient object regions across images, without any prior assumption or knowledge of the contents of the corresponding scenes, enhances many computer vision and computer graphics applications. We introduce a regional contrast based salient object detection algorithm, which simultaneously evaluates global contrast differences and spatial weighted coherence scores. The proposed algorithm is simple, efficient, naturally multi-scale, and produces full-resolution, high-quality saliency maps. These saliency maps are further used to initialize a novel iterative version of GrabCut, namely SaliencyCut, for high quality unsupervised salient object segmentation. We extensively evaluated our algorithm using traditional salient object detection datasets, as well as a more challenging Internet image dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm consistently outperforms 15 existing salient object detection and segmentation methods, yielding higher precision and better recall rates. We also show that our algorithm can be used to efficiently extract salient object masks from Internet images, enabling effective sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) via simple shape comparisons. Despite such noisy internet images, where the saliency regions are ambiguous, our saliency guided image retrieval achieves a superior retrieval rate compared with state-of-the-art SBIR methods, and additionally provides important target object region information.

3,653 citations


Book
11 Aug 2011
TL;DR: The authors describe an algorithm that reconstructs a close approximation of 1-D and 2-D signals from their multiscale edges and shows that the evolution of wavelet local maxima across scales characterize the local shape of irregular structures.
Abstract: A multiscale Canny edge detection is equivalent to finding the local maxima of a wavelet transform. The authors study the properties of multiscale edges through the wavelet theory. For pattern recognition, one often needs to discriminate different types of edges. They show that the evolution of wavelet local maxima across scales characterize the local shape of irregular structures. Numerical descriptors of edge types are derived. The completeness of a multiscale edge representation is also studied. The authors describe an algorithm that reconstructs a close approximation of 1-D and 2-D signals from their multiscale edges. For images, the reconstruction errors are below visual sensitivity. As an application, a compact image coding algorithm that selects important edges and compresses the image data by factors over 30 has been implemented. >

3,187 citations


Book
01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: In this paper, the acquisition and use of digital images in a wide variety of scientific fields is discussed. But the focus is on high dynamic range imaging in more than two dimensions.
Abstract: "This guide clearly explains the acquisition and use of digital images in a wide variety of scientific fields. This sixth edition features new sections on selecting a camera with resolution appropriate for use on light microscopes, on the ability of current cameras to capture raw images with high dynamic range, and on imaging in more than two dimensions. It discusses Dmax for X-ray images and combining images with different exposure settings to further extend the dynamic range. This edition also includes a new chapter on shape measurements, a review of new developments in image file searching, and a wide range of new examples and diagrams"

3,017 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A new graphical user interface to the MOSFLM program has been developed to simplify the processing of macromolecular diffraction data and provides visual feedback on the progress of each stage.
Abstract: iMOSFLM is a graphical user interface to the diffraction data-integration program MOSFLM. It is designed to simplify data processing by dividing the process into a series of steps, which are normally carried out sequentially. Each step has its own display pane, allowing control over parameters that influence that step and providing graphical feedback to the user. Suitable values for integration parameters are set automatically, but additional menus provide a detailed level of control for experienced users. The image display and the interfaces to the different tasks (indexing, strategy calculation, cell refinement, integration and history) are described. The most important parameters for each step and the best way of assessing success or failure are discussed.

2,707 citations


Book
21 Jul 2011
TL;DR: This textbook introduces sparse and redundant representations with a focus on applications in signal and image processing and how to use the proper model for tasks such as denoising, restoration, separation, interpolation and extrapolation, compression, sampling, analysis and synthesis, detection, recognition, and more.
Abstract: This textbook introduces sparse and redundant representations with a focus on applications in signal and image processing The theoretical and numerical foundations are tackled before the applications are discussed Mathematical modeling for signal sources is discussed along with how to use the proper model for tasks such as denoising, restoration, separation, interpolation and extrapolation, compression, sampling, analysis and synthesis, detection, recognition, and more The presentation is elegant and engaging Sparse and Redundant Representations is intended for graduate students in applied mathematics and electrical engineering, as well as applied mathematicians, engineers, and researchers who are active in the fields of signal and image processing

2,106 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A fully-automated segmentation method that uses manually labelled image data to provide anatomical training information and is assessed both quantitatively, using Leave-One-Out testing on the 336 training images, and qualitatively,Using an independent clinical dataset involving Alzheimer's disease.

2,047 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: SIFT flow is proposed, a method to align an image to its nearest neighbors in a large image corpus containing a variety of scenes, where image information is transferred from the nearest neighbors to a query image according to the dense scene correspondence.
Abstract: While image alignment has been studied in different areas of computer vision for decades, aligning images depicting different scenes remains a challenging problem. Analogous to optical flow, where an image is aligned to its temporally adjacent frame, we propose SIFT flow, a method to align an image to its nearest neighbors in a large image corpus containing a variety of scenes. The SIFT flow algorithm consists of matching densely sampled, pixelwise SIFT features between two images while preserving spatial discontinuities. The SIFT features allow robust matching across different scene/object appearances, whereas the discontinuity-preserving spatial model allows matching of objects located at different parts of the scene. Experiments show that the proposed approach robustly aligns complex scene pairs containing significant spatial differences. Based on SIFT flow, we propose an alignment-based large database framework for image analysis and synthesis, where image information is transferred from the nearest neighbors to a query image according to the dense scene correspondence. This framework is demonstrated through concrete applications such as motion field prediction from a single image, motion synthesis via object transfer, satellite image registration, and face recognition.

1,726 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: DIIVINE is capable of assessing the quality of a distorted image across multiple distortion categories, as against most NR IQA algorithms that are distortion-specific in nature, and is statistically superior to the often used measure of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and statistically equivalent to the popular structural similarity index (SSIM).
Abstract: Our approach to blind image quality assessment (IQA) is based on the hypothesis that natural scenes possess certain statistical properties which are altered in the presence of distortion, rendering them un-natural; and that by characterizing this un-naturalness using scene statistics, one can identify the distortion afflicting the image and perform no-reference (NR) IQA. Based on this theory, we propose an (NR)/blind algorithm-the Distortion Identification-based Image Verity and INtegrity Evaluation (DIIVINE) index-that assesses the quality of a distorted image without need for a reference image. DIIVINE is based on a 2-stage framework involving distortion identification followed by distortion-specific quality assessment. DIIVINE is capable of assessing the quality of a distorted image across multiple distortion categories, as against most NR IQA algorithms that are distortion-specific in nature. DIIVINE is based on natural scene statistics which govern the behavior of natural images. In this paper, we detail the principles underlying DIIVINE, the statistical features extracted and their relevance to perception and thoroughly evaluate the algorithm on the popular LIVE IQA database. Further, we compare the performance of DIIVINE against leading full-reference (FR) IQA algorithms and demonstrate that DIIVINE is statistically superior to the often used measure of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and statistically equivalent to the popular structural similarity index (SSIM). A software release of DIIVINE has been made available online: http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/quality/DIIVINE_release.zip for public use and evaluation.

1,501 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Extensive experiments on image deblurring and super-resolution validate that by using adaptive sparse domain selection and adaptive regularization, the proposed method achieves much better results than many state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both PSNR and visual perception.
Abstract: As a powerful statistical image modeling technique, sparse representation has been successfully used in various image restoration applications. The success of sparse representation owes to the development of the l1-norm optimization techniques and the fact that natural images are intrinsically sparse in some domains. The image restoration quality largely depends on whether the employed sparse domain can represent well the underlying image. Considering that the contents can vary significantly across different images or different patches in a single image, we propose to learn various sets of bases from a precollected dataset of example image patches, and then, for a given patch to be processed, one set of bases are adaptively selected to characterize the local sparse domain. We further introduce two adaptive regularization terms into the sparse representation framework. First, a set of autoregressive (AR) models are learned from the dataset of example image patches. The best fitted AR models to a given patch are adaptively selected to regularize the image local structures. Second, the image nonlocal self-similarity is introduced as another regularization term. In addition, the sparsity regularization parameter is adaptively estimated for better image restoration performance. Extensive experiments on image deblurring and super-resolution validate that by using adaptive sparse domain selection and adaptive regularization, the proposed method achieves much better results than many state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both PSNR and visual perception.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Typical topics and problems encountered during data processing of diffraction experiments are discussed and the tools provided in the autoPROC software are described.
Abstract: A typical diffraction experiment will generate many images and data sets from different crystals in a very short time. This creates a challenge for the high-throughput operation of modern synchrotron beamlines as well as for the subsequent data processing. Novice users in particular may feel overwhelmed by the tables, plots and numbers that the different data-processing programs and software packages present to them. Here, some of the more common problems that a user has to deal with when processing a set of images that will finally make up a processed data set are shown, concentrating on difficulties that may often show up during the first steps along the path of turning the experiment (i.e. data collection) into a model (i.e. interpreted electron density). Difficulties such as unexpected crystal forms, issues in crystal handling and suboptimal choices of data-collection strategies can often be dealt with, or at least diagnosed, by analysing specific data characteristics during processing. In the end, one wants to distinguish problems over which one has no immediate control once the experiment is finished from problems that can be remedied a posteriori. A new software package, autoPROC, is also presented that combines third-party processing programs with new tools and an automated workflow script that is intended to provide users with both guidance and insight into the offline processing of data affected by the difficulties mentioned above, with particular emphasis on the automated treatment of multi-sweep data sets collected on multi-axis goniostats.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A novel region-based method for image segmentation, which is able to simultaneously segment the image and estimate the bias field, and the estimated bias field can be used for intensity inhomogeneity correction (or bias correction).
Abstract: Intensity inhomogeneity often occurs in real-world images, which presents a considerable challenge in image segmentation. The most widely used image segmentation algorithms are region-based and typically rely on the homogeneity of the image intensities in the regions of interest, which often fail to provide accurate segmentation results due to the intensity inhomogeneity. This paper proposes a novel region-based method for image segmentation, which is able to deal with intensity inhomogeneities in the segmentation. First, based on the model of images with intensity inhomogeneities, we derive a local intensity clustering property of the image intensities, and define a local clustering criterion function for the image intensities in a neighborhood of each point. This local clustering criterion function is then integrated with respect to the neighborhood center to give a global criterion of image segmentation. In a level set formulation, this criterion defines an energy in terms of the level set functions that represent a partition of the image domain and a bias field that accounts for the intensity inhomogeneity of the image. Therefore, by minimizing this energy, our method is able to simultaneously segment the image and estimate the bias field, and the estimated bias field can be used for intensity inhomogeneity correction (or bias correction). Our method has been validated on synthetic images and real images of various modalities, with desirable performance in the presence of intensity inhomogeneities. Experiments show that our method is more robust to initialization, faster and more accurate than the well-known piecewise smooth model. As an application, our method has been used for segmentation and bias correction of magnetic resonance (MR) images with promising results.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper aims to test the hypothesis that when viewing natural images, the optimal perceptual weights for pooling should be proportional to local information content, which can be estimated in units of bit using advanced statistical models of natural images.
Abstract: Many state-of-the-art perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms share a common two-stage structure: local quality/distortion measurement followed by pooling. While significant progress has been made in measuring local image quality/distortion, the pooling stage is often done in ad-hoc ways, lacking theoretical principles and reliable computational models. This paper aims to test the hypothesis that when viewing natural images, the optimal perceptual weights for pooling should be proportional to local information content, which can be estimated in units of bit using advanced statistical models of natural images. Our extensive studies based upon six publicly-available subject-rated image databases concluded with three useful findings. First, information content weighting leads to consistent improvement in the performance of IQA algorithms. Second, surprisingly, with information content weighting, even the widely criticized peak signal-to-noise-ratio can be converted to a competitive perceptual quality measure when compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. Third, the best overall performance is achieved by combining information content weighting with multiscale structural similarity measures.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Dramatic improvements on the order of 4-18 dB in reconstruction error and doubling of the acceptable undersampling factor using the proposed adaptive dictionary as compared to previous CS methods are demonstrated.
Abstract: Compressed sensing (CS) utilizes the sparsity of magnetic resonance (MR) images to enable accurate reconstruction from undersampled k-space data. Recent CS methods have employed analytical sparsifying transforms such as wavelets, curvelets, and finite differences. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for adaptively learning the sparsifying transform (dictionary), and reconstructing the image simultaneously from highly undersampled k-space data. The sparsity in this framework is enforced on overlapping image patches emphasizing local structure. Moreover, the dictionary is adapted to the particular image instance thereby favoring better sparsities and consequently much higher undersampling rates. The proposed alternating reconstruction algorithm learns the sparsifying dictionary, and uses it to remove aliasing and noise in one step, and subsequently restores and fills-in the k-space data in the other step. Numerical experiments are conducted on MR images and on real MR data of several anatomies with a variety of sampling schemes. The results demonstrate dramatic improvements on the order of 4-18 dB in reconstruction error and doubling of the acceptable undersampling factor using the proposed adaptive dictionary as compared to previous CS methods. These improvements persist over a wide range of practical data signal-to-noise ratios, without any parameter tuning.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Nov 2011
TL;DR: As a typical application of the LBP approach, LBP-based facial image analysis is extensively reviewed, while its successful extensions, which deal with various tasks of facial imageAnalysis, are also highlighted.
Abstract: Local binary pattern (LBP) is a nonparametric descriptor, which efficiently summarizes the local structures of images. In recent years, it has aroused increasing interest in many areas of image processing and computer vision and has shown its effectiveness in a number of applications, in particular for facial image analysis, including tasks as diverse as face detection, face recognition, facial expression analysis, and demographic classification. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of LBP methodology, including several more recent variations. As a typical application of the LBP approach, LBP-based facial image analysis is extensively reviewed, while its successful extensions, which deal with various tasks of facial image analysis, are also highlighted.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The problem of detecting if an image has been forged is investigated; in particular, attention has been paid to the case in which an area of an image is copied and then pasted onto another zone to create a duplication or to cancel something that was awkward.
Abstract: One of the principal problems in image forensics is determining if a particular image is authentic or not. This can be a crucial task when images are used as basic evidence to influence judgment like, for example, in a court of law. To carry out such forensic analysis, various technological instruments have been developed in the literature. In this paper, the problem of detecting if an image has been forged is investigated; in particular, attention has been paid to the case in which an area of an image is copied and then pasted onto another zone to create a duplication or to cancel something that was awkward. Generally, to adapt the image patch to the new context a geometric transformation is needed. To detect such modifications, a novel methodology based on scale invariant features transform (SIFT) is proposed. Such a method allows us to both understand if a copy-move attack has occurred and, furthermore, to recover the geometric transformation used to perform cloning. Extensive experimental results are presented to confirm that the technique is able to precisely individuate the altered area and, in addition, to estimate the geometric transformation parameters with high reliability. The method also deals with multiple cloning.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
20 Jul 2011
TL;DR: Preliminary experimental results are quite promising with 98% classification accuracy on a malware database of 9,458 samples with 25 different malware families and the technique exhibits interesting resilience to popular obfuscation techniques such as section encryption.
Abstract: We propose a simple yet effective method for visualizing and classifying malware using image processing techniques. Malware binaries are visualized as gray-scale images, with the observation that for many malware families, the images belonging to the same family appear very similar in layout and texture. Motivated by this visual similarity, a classification method using standard image features is proposed. Neither disassembly nor code execution is required for classification. Preliminary experimental results are quite promising with 98% classification accuracy on a malware database of 9,458 samples with 25 different malware families. Our technique also exhibits interesting resilience to popular obfuscation techniques such as section encryption.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A supervised workflow is proposed in this study to reduce manual labor and objectify the choice of significant object features and classification thresholds and resulted in accuracies between 73% and 87% for the affected areas, and approximately balanced commission and omission errors.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This work introduces the new concept of total generalized variation for magnetic resonance imaging, a new mathematical framework, which is a generalization of the total variation theory and which eliminates these restrictions.
Abstract: Total variation was recently introduced in many different magnetic resonance imaging applications. The assumption of total variation is that images consist of areas, which are piecewise constant. However, in many practical magnetic resonance imaging situations, this assumption is not valid due to the inhomogeneities of the exciting B1 field and the receive coils. This work introduces the new concept of total generalized variation for magnetic resonance imaging, a new mathematical framework, which is a generalization of the total variation theory and which eliminates these restrictions. Two important applications are considered in this article, image denoising and image reconstruction from undersampled radial data sets with multiple coils. Apart from simulations, experimental results from in vivo measurements are presented where total generalized variation yielded improved image quality over conventional total variation in all cases.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A constructive polynomial preparation for the FRQI state from an initial state, an algorithm for quantum image compression (QIC), and processing operations for quantum images are combined to build the whole process for Quantum image processing onFRQI.
Abstract: A Flexible Representation of Quantum Images (FRQI) is proposed to provide a representation for images on quantum computers in the form of a normalized state which captures information about colors and their corresponding positions in the images. A constructive polynomial preparation for the FRQI state from an initial state, an algorithm for quantum image compression (QIC), and processing operations for quantum images are combined to build the whole process for quantum image processing on FRQI. The simulation experiments on FRQI include storing, retrieving of images and a detection of a line in binary images by applying quantum Fourier transform as a processing operation. The compression ratios of QIC between groups of same color positions range from 68.75 to 90.63% on single digit images and 6.67---31.62% on the Lena image. The FRQI provides a foundation not only to express images but also to explore theoretical and practical aspects of image processing on quantum computers.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
20 Jun 2011
TL;DR: This paper demonstrates a simple, yet powerful method to automatically select high aesthetic quality images from large image collections and demonstrates that an aesthetics classifier trained on describable attributes can provide a significant improvement over baseline methods for predicting human quality judgments.
Abstract: With the rise in popularity of digital cameras, the amount of visual data available on the web is growing exponentially. Some of these pictures are extremely beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, but the vast majority are uninteresting or of low quality. This paper demonstrates a simple, yet powerful method to automatically select high aesthetic quality images from large image collections. Our aesthetic quality estimation method explicitly predicts some of the possible image cues that a human might use to evaluate an image and then uses them in a discriminative approach. These cues or high level describable image attributes fall into three broad types: 1) compositional attributes related to image layout or configuration, 2) content attributes related to the objects or scene types depicted, and 3) sky-illumination attributes related to the natural lighting conditions. We demonstrate that an aesthetics classifier trained on these describable attributes can provide a significant improvement over baseline methods for predicting human quality judgments. We also demonstrate our method for predicting the “interestingness” of Flickr photos, and introduce a novel problem of estimating query specific “interestingness”.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The experimental results show that the shift-invariant property is of great importance for image fusion, and it is concluded that short filter usually provides better fusion results than long filter, and the appropriate setting for the number of decomposition levels is four.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is shown how one can create and label large data sets of real-world images to train classifiers which measure the presence, absence, or degree to which an attribute is expressed in images, which can then automatically label new images.
Abstract: We introduce the use of describable visual attributes for face verification and image search. Describable visual attributes are labels that can be given to an image to describe its appearance. This paper focuses on images of faces and the attributes used to describe them, although the concepts also apply to other domains. Examples of face attributes include gender, age, jaw shape, nose size, etc. The advantages of an attribute-based representation for vision tasks are manifold: They can be composed to create descriptions at various levels of specificity; they are generalizable, as they can be learned once and then applied to recognize new objects or categories without any further training; and they are efficient, possibly requiring exponentially fewer attributes (and training data) than explicitly naming each category. We show how one can create and label large data sets of real-world images to train classifiers which measure the presence, absence, or degree to which an attribute is expressed in images. These classifiers can then automatically label new images. We demonstrate the current effectiveness-and explore the future potential-of using attributes for face verification and image search via human and computational experiments. Finally, we introduce two new face data sets, named FaceTracer and PubFig, with labeled attributes and identities, respectively.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This work proposes a novel method for 3D shape recovery of faces that exploits the similarity of faces, and obtains as input a single image and uses a mere single 3D reference model of a different person's face.
Abstract: Human faces are remarkably similar in global properties, including size, aspect ratio, and location of main features, but can vary considerably in details across individuals, gender, race, or due to facial expression. We propose a novel method for 3D shape recovery of faces that exploits the similarity of faces. Our method obtains as input a single image and uses a mere single 3D reference model of a different person's face. Classical reconstruction methods from single images, i.e., shape-from-shading, require knowledge of the reflectance properties and lighting as well as depth values for boundary conditions. Recent methods circumvent these requirements by representing input faces as combinations (of hundreds) of stored 3D models. We propose instead to use the input image as a guide to "mold” a single reference model to reach a reconstruction of the sought 3D shape. Our method assumes Lambertian reflectance and uses harmonic representations of lighting. It has been tested on images taken under controlled viewing conditions as well as on uncontrolled images downloaded from the Internet, demonstrating its accuracy and robustness under a variety of imaging conditions and overcoming significant differences in shape between the input and reference individuals including differences in facial expressions, gender, and race.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A new method is proposed to detect falls by analyzing human shape deformation during a video sequence, which gives very good results (as low as 0% error with a multi-camera setup) compared with other common image processing methods.
Abstract: Faced with the growing population of seniors, developed countries need to establish new healthcare systems to ensure the safety of elderly people at home. Computer vision provides a promising solution to analyze personal behavior and detect certain unusual events such as falls. In this paper, a new method is proposed to detect falls by analyzing human shape deformation during a video sequence. A shape matching technique is used to track the person's silhouette along the video sequence. The shape deformation is then quantified from these silhouettes based on shape analysis methods. Finally, falls are detected from normal activities using a Gaussian mixture model. This paper has been conducted on a realistic data set of daily activities and simulated falls, and gives very good results (as low as 0% error with a multi-camera setup) compared with other common image processing methods.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
25 Jul 2011
TL;DR: This paper shows state-of-the-art edge-aware processing using standard Laplacian pyramids, and proposes a set of image filters to achieve edge-preserving smoothing, detail enhancement, tone mapping, and inverse tone mapping.
Abstract: The Laplacian pyramid is ubiquitous for decomposing images into multiple scales and is widely used for image analysis. However, because it is constructed with spatially invariant Gaussian kernels, the Laplacian pyramid is widely believed as being unable to represent edges well and as being ill-suited for edge-aware operations such as edge-preserving smoothing and tone mapping. To tackle these tasks, a wealth of alternative techniques and representations have been proposed, e.g., anisotropic diffusion, neighborhood filtering, and specialized wavelet bases. While these methods have demonstrated successful results, they come at the price of additional complexity, often accompanied by higher computational cost or the need to post-process the generated results. In this paper, we show state-of-the-art edge-aware processing using standard Laplacian pyramids. We characterize edges with a simple threshold on pixel values that allows us to differentiate large-scale edges from small-scale details. Building upon this result, we propose a set of image filters to achieve edge-preserving smoothing, detail enhancement, tone mapping, and inverse tone mapping. The advantage of our approach is its simplicity and flexibility, relying only on simple point-wise nonlinearities and small Gaussian convolutions; no optimization or post-processing is required. As we demonstrate, our method produces consistently high-quality results, without degrading edges or introducing halos.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The denoising process is expressed as a linear expansion of thresholds (LET) that is optimized by relying on a purely data-adaptive unbiased estimate of the mean-squared error (MSE) derived in a non-Bayesian framework (PURE: Poisson-Gaussian unbiased risk estimate).
Abstract: We propose a general methodology (PURE-LET) to design and optimize a wide class of transform-domain thresholding algorithms for denoising images corrupted by mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise. We express the denoising process as a linear expansion of thresholds (LET) that we optimize by relying on a purely data-adaptive unbiased estimate of the mean-squared error (MSE), derived in a non-Bayesian framework (PURE: Poisson-Gaussian unbiased risk estimate). We provide a practical approximation of this theoretical MSE estimate for the tractable optimization of arbitrary transform-domain thresholding. We then propose a pointwise estimator for undecimated filterbank transforms, which consists of subband-adaptive thresholding functions with signal-dependent thresholds that are globally optimized in the image domain. We finally demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques that are specifically tailored to the estimation of Poisson intensities. We also present denoising results obtained on real images of low-count fluorescence microscopy.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Common difficulties in longitudinal image processing are discussed, focusing on the introduction of bias, and the approaches taken to avoid them in the FreeSurfer longitudinal processing stream are described.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper an attempt is made to study the performance of most commonly used edge detection techniques for image segmentation and the comparison of these techniques is carried out with an experiment by using MATLAB software.
Abstract: Interpretation of image contents is one of the objectives in computer vision specifically in image processing. In this era it has received much awareness of researchers. In image interpretation the partition of the image into object and background is a severe step. Segmentation separates an image into its component regions or objects. Image segmentation t needs to segment the object from the background to read the image properly and identify the content of the image carefully. In this context, edge detection is a fundamental tool for image segmentation. In this paper an attempt is made to study the performance of most commonly used edge detection techniques for image segmentation and also the comparison of these techniques is carried out with an experiment by using MATLAB software.