Image super-resolution by curve fitting in the threshold decomposition domain

A new curve-fitting scheme is proposed in this paper to produce super-resolution images from a single low-resolution source image. The most unique feature of this method is that the threshold decomposition is performed on the given source image to obtain multiple binary images so that the curve-fitting applied on each resulted binary image can be made very efficient and accurate, thus allowing us to focus on tiny objects and thin structures so as to achieve rather nice visual results even when a large up-scaling factor is used. Two novel techniques are further proposed to improve the visual quality: (1) a spreading technique (applied on some significant pixels detected in each threshold decomposed binary image) is used to remove ladder-like false edges that often appear visually in super-resolution images, and (2) an edge correction (guided by the edge information extracted from the original source image) is used to sharpen all inherent edges. Our results are compared with those achieved by using the state-of-arts techniques, showing the ability of our algorithm to achieve a better visual quality in smooth areas as well as for sharp edges and small objects.     

基于图像分割和平台直方图均衡的红外图像增强算法

针对原始红外图像模糊、对比度低的特点,提出了一种基于图像分割的平台直方图均衡算法。首先采取实时阈值提取方法选取阈值,将图像目标灰度与背景灰度分开;然后利用对数、指数结合的非线性变换抑制背景区域,扩展目标区域的动态范围;最后利用改进的双平台直方图均衡算法处理非线性变换后的灰度图像。实验结果表明:该方法有效地增强了原始红外图像,提高图像对比度的同时很好地保留了图像的细节和边缘信息,且避免了过亮现象,视觉效果得到改善。     

基于Tsallis熵的红外偏振热像分割算法

传统红外热像存在对比度低、边缘模糊等不足而使目标区域分割困难,红外偏振热像能够凸显边缘和轮廓特征,因此在环境监测、军事侦察、工业无损检测等领域得到广泛的应用,但如何进行红外偏振热像分割目前研究较少。为此,本文提出了一种基于Tsallis熵的红外偏振热像分割算法。首先通过Tsallis阈值对偏振方位角热像进行初分割,然后以最小化初分割热像交集与并集误差率优化Tsallis指数,再利用指数优化后的Tsallis阈值对偏振方位角热像进行优化分割并通过连通域检测去除误分割得到二次分割图,最后以二次分割图交集区域为种子区域、并集区域为边界,通过区域生长法得到最终分割热像。实验结果显示,本文算法相对最小Tsallis交叉熵法、Otsu法和模糊聚类法错分区域小,在主观视觉效果和区域间对比度、形状测度评价指标上有较大的改善,能够更准确地分割出目标。     

Bayesian salient object detection based on saliency driven clustering

Salient object detection is essential for applications, such as image classification, object recognition and image retrieval. In this paper, we design a new approach to detect salient objects from an image by describing what does salient objects and backgrounds look like using statistic of the image. First, we introduce a saliency driven clustering method to reveal distinct visual patterns of images by generating image clusters. The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is applied to represent the statistic of each cluster, which is used to compute the color spatial distribution. Second, three kinds of regional saliency measures, i.e, regional color contrast saliency, regional boundary prior saliency and regional color spatial distribution, are computed and combined. Then, a region selection strategy integrating color contrast prior, boundary prior and visual patterns information of images is presented. The pixels of an image are divided into either potential salient region or background region adaptively based on the combined regional saliency measures. Finally, a Bayesian framework is employed to compute the saliency value for each pixel taking the regional saliency values as priority. Our approach has been extensively evaluated on two popular image databases. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve considerable performance improvement in terms of commonly adopted performance measures in salient object detection.     

基于聚类分析和骨架提取的含裂纹超声红外热像增强方法研究北大核心CSCD

超声红外热图像因噪声干扰及缺陷位置的热扩散,导致其存在对比度差、清晰度低、边缘模糊等问题。为了增强红外图像视觉效果,提高缺陷检测能力,提出了一种基于聚类分析和缺陷骨架的超声红外图像增强方法。采用基于kmeans的DBSCAN聚类算法对裂纹发热区域进行识别聚类,将图像分解为缺陷生热区域与非缺陷区域;然后,对缺陷区域进行骨架描述,并沿裂纹骨架走向采用改进的部分子块重叠直方图均衡算法对缺陷图像进行增强。提出的超声红外图像增强方法与常用的直方均衡化、限制对比度自适应直方图均衡化、自适应同态滤波三种方法进行对比,结果表明所提的增强方法可以得到对比度更显著的图像,具有明显的优势。提出的方法为增强超声红外图像视觉效果、提升裂纹诊断能力提供了一种有效方法。     

Nonlinear diffusion in Laplacian pyramid domain for ultrasonic speckle reduction

A new speckle reduction method, i.e., Laplacian pyramid-based nonlinear diffusion (LPND), is proposed for medical ultrasound imaging. With this method, speckle is removed by nonlinear diffusion filtering of bandpass ultrasound images in Laplacian pyramid domain. For nonlinear diffusion in each pyramid layer, a gradient threshold is automatically determined by a variation of median absolute deviation (MAD) estimator. The performance of the proposed LPND method has been compared with that of other speckle reduction methods, including the recently proposed speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion (SRAD) and nonlinear coherent diffusion (NCD). In simulation and phantom studies, an average gain of 1.55 dB and 1.34 dB in contrast-to-noise ratio was obtained compared to SRAD and NCD, respectively. The visual comparison of despeckled in vivo ultrasound images from liver and carotid artery shows that the proposed LPND method could effectively preserve edges and detailed structures while thoroughly suppressing speckle. These preliminary results indicate that the proposed speckle reduction method could improve image quality and the visibility of small structures and fine details in medical ultrasound imaging.     

基于各向异性扩散的SAR图像斑点噪声滤波算法

在SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar)图像噪声抑制处理中,为了有效地保持图像边缘,作者在斑点噪声去除的各向异性扩散模型(SRAD模型)的基础上,提出了一个基于各向异性扩散的SAR图像斑点噪声滤波算法.该算法对应的扩散系数从理论上满足Charbonnier 等人提出的构造扩散系数准则,同时该算法能够通过对边缘直方图上累计百分比和相对信噪比阈值进行调节来得到一系列不同的滤波效果,从而满足不同的应用需求,如绘图、高分辨率或细节丰富的处理结果.实验结果表明,与传统的方法相比,该算法不论从噪声去除能力、边缘和纹理保持能力上,还是从视觉评价效果来看,都具有一定的优越性.     

Comparative study of semi-implicit schemes for nonlinear diffusion in hyperspectral imagery.

Nonlinear diffusion has been successfully employed over the past two decades to enhance images by reducing undesirable intensity variability within the objects in the image, while enhancing the contrast of the boundaries (edges) in scalar and, more recently, in vector-valued images, such as color, multispectral, and hyperspectral imagery. In this paper, we show that nonlinear diffusion can improve the classification accuracy of hyperspectral imagery by reducing the spatial and spectral variability of the image, while preserving the boundaries of the objects. We also show that semi-implicit schemes can speedup significantly the evolution of the nonlinear diffusion equation with respect to traditional explicit schemes.     

Comparison of PDE-based nonlinear diffusion approaches for image enhancement and denoising in optical coherence tomography

A comparison between two nonlinear diffusion methods for denoising OCT images is performed. Specifically, we compare and contrast the performance of the traditional nonlinear Perona-Malik filter with a complex diffusion filter that has been recently introduced by Gilboa et al.. The complex diffusion approach based on the generalization of the nonlinear scale space to the complex domain by combining the diffusion and the free Schridinger equation is evaluated on synthetic images and also on representative OCT images at various noise levels. The performance improvement over the traditional nonlinear Perona-Malik filter is quantified in terms of noise suppression, image structural preservation and visual quality. An average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement of about 2.5 times and an average contrast to noise ratio (CNR) improvement of 49% was obtained while mean structure similarity (MSSIM) was practically not degraded after denoising. The nonlinear complex diffusion filtering can be applied with success to many OCT imaging applications. In summary, the numerical values of the image quality metrics along with the qualitative analysis results indicated the good feature preservation performance of the complex diffusion process, as desired for better diagnosis in medical imaging processing.     

Nonlinear Gaussian filtering approach for object segmentation

Gaussian filter kernels can be used to smooth textures for image segmentation. In so-called anisotropic diffusion techniques, the smoothing process is adapted according to the edge direction to preserve the edges. However, the segment borders obtained with this approach do not necessarily coincide with physical object contours, especially in the case of textured objects. A novel segmentation technique involving weighted Gaussian filtering is introduced. The extraction of true object masks is performed by smoothing edges due to texture and preserving true object borders. In this process, additional features such as disparity or motion are taken into account. The method presented has been successfully applied in the context of object segmentation to natural scenes and object-based disparity estimation for stereoscopic applications     

一种改进型图像降噪方法

针对图像获取中易受到噪声干扰的问题,介绍了图像去噪处理的几种常用算法（邻域平均法、中值滤波法、图像间的平均滤波）,对比阐述了各自的优缺点及适用范围。提出了一种基于平滑滤波的小波阈值图像去噪算法,该算法采用中值滤波和小波阈值相结合的方式对图像进行平滑处理。实验结果表明,该方法不仅有利于图像噪声的去除,而且边缘信息也得到了较好的保留,使图像具有更好的视觉效果,还原出图像的本来面目。     

Detection of edges from projections

In a number of applications of computerized tomography, the ultimate goal is to detect and characterize objects within a cross section. Detection of edges of different contrast regions yields the required information. The problem of detecting edges from projection data is addressed. It is shown that the class of linear edge detection operators used on images can be used for detection of edges directly from projection data. This not only reduces the computational burden but also avoids the difficulties of postprocessing a reconstructed image. This is accomplished by a convolution backprojection operation. For example, with the Marr-Hildreth edge detection operator, the filtering function that is to be used on the projection data is the Radon transform of the Laplacian of the 2-D Gaussian function which is combined with the reconstruction filter. Simulation results showing the efficacy of the proposed method and a comparison with edges detected from the reconstructed image are presented.     

Data fusion for visual tracking with particles

The effectiveness of probabilistic tracking of objects in image sequences has been revolutionized by the development of particle filtering. Whereas Kalman filters are restricted to Gaussian distributions, particle filters can propagate more general distributions, albeit only approximately. This is of particular benefit in visual tracking because of the inherent ambiguity of the visual world that stems from its richness and complexity. One important advantage of the particle filtering framework is that it allows the information from different measurement sources to be fused in a principled manner. Although this fact has been acknowledged before, it has not been fully exploited within a visual tracking context. Here we introduce generic importance sampling mechanisms for data fusion and discuss them for fusing color with either stereo sound, for teleconferencing, or with motion, for surveillance with a still camera. We show how each of the three cues can be modeled by an appropriate data likelihood function, and how the intermittent cues (sound or motion) are best handled by generating proposal distributions from their likelihood functions. Finally, the effective fusion of the cues by particle filtering is demonstrated on real teleconference and surveillance data.     

Automatic Contour Detection Using a "Fixed-Point Hachimura-Kuwahara Filter" for SPECT Attenuation Correction

Attenuation correction for single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) usually assumes a uniform attenuation distribution within the body surface contour. Previous methods to estimate this contour have used thresholding of a reconstructed section image. This method is often very sensitive to the selection of a threshold value, especially for nonuniform activity distributions within the body. We have proposed the "fixed-point Hachimura-Kuwahara filter" to extract contour primitives from SPECT images. The Hachimura-Kuwahara filter, which preserves edges but smoothes nonedge regions, is applied repeatedly to identify the invariant set-the fixed-point image-which is unchanged by this nonlinear, two-dimensional filtering operation. This image usually becomes a piecewise constant array. In order to detect the contour, the tracing algorithm based on the minimum distance connection criterion is applied to the extracted contour primitives. This procedure does not require choice of a threshold value in determining the contour. SPECT data from a water-filled elliptical phantom containing three sources was obtained and scattered projections were reconstructed. The automatic edge detection procedure was applied to the scattered window reconstruction, resulting in a reasonable outline of the phantom.     

A new image smoothing method based on a simple model of spatialprocessing in the early stages of human vision

The difficulty of preserving edges is central to the problem of smoothing images. The main problem is that of distinguishing between meaningful contours and noise, so that the image can be smoothed without loss of details. Substantial efforts have been devoted to solving this difficult problem, and a plethora of filtering methods have been proposed in the literature. Non-linear filters have proved to be more efficient than their linear counterparts. Here, a new nonlinear filter for noise smoothing is introduced. This filter is based on the psychophysical phenomenon of human visual contrast sensitivity. Results on real images are presented to demonstrate the validity of our approach compared to other known filtering methods.     

基于图像局部熵的红外图像分割方法

分析了图像局部熵的性质,提出了一种基于图像局部熵的红外图像分割方法。该方法首先进行中值滤波消除图像脉冲噪声,然后计算图像局部熵进行阈值选择提取目标边缘,最后进行边缘连接分割出目标区域。对不同红外图像进行的仿真试验表明了该方法的有效性。     

基于显著性的多波段图像同步融合方法

针对多波段融合图像存在对比度低、显著目标不突出的问题,本文提出了一种基于显著性的多波段图像同步融合方法。首先,近红外图像被用来作为数据保真项,红外图像和可见光图像分别为融合结果提供红外显著信息和细节信息;其次,基于视觉显著的红外显著区域提取方法被用来构造权重图,以克服融合结果显著区域不突出和边缘模糊问题;最后,采用交替方向乘子法（alternating direction method of multipliers, ADMM）来求解模型,得到融合结果。研究结果表明,较于代表性图像融合算法,所提算法能在保留红外图像热辐射信息的同时,保有较好的清晰细节,并在多项客观评价指标上优于代表性算法。     

一种改进的红外图像自适应增强方法

对红外图像而言,如何在压缩动态范围的同时增强细节、抑制噪声以提升显示效果是一个重要的课题。文中提出一种改进的红外图像自适应增强方法,首先设计了一种参数自适应的引导滤波方法,并基于引导滤波将原始红外图像拆分成基本层和细节层;然后基于像素灰度分布设计了一种新型的自适应阈值的直方图映射方法,以对基本层压缩动态范围并增强其对比度;之后利用自适应引导滤波的线性系数对细节层进行增强并抑制噪声;最后对增强后的基本层和细节层进行自适应融合得到增强后的红外图像。实验结果表明,与对比度受限的自适应直方图均衡方法、基于引导滤波的高动态红外图像增强方法等几种效果相对较好的方法相比,文中所提出的方法处理后的图像细节更丰富,噪声抑制效果更强,视觉效果更好,且该方法适应性更强,无须调整参数即可应对多种观测场景。     

利用多尺度分析和编组的基于目标的注意计算模型

模拟生物视觉感知提出一种基于目标的注意计算模型,主要用到两个关键技术:多尺度分析和编组.用于多尺度分析的微分算子从原始图像中提取重要边缘,随后源于格式塔知觉组织规则的轮廓编组过程将边缘组织成感知目标.注意焦点按照各目标显著程度递减的顺序在目标间转移,目标显著程度由边缘重要性、区域对比度和轮廓闭合性共同决定.该模型考虑了目标的独立性和完整性,因此比基于空间的注意有更高的检测精度.多尺度分析为轮廓编组提供了候选边缘,从而提高了编组的效率.对多类自然图像的实验验证了该模型计算上的高效性和生物学上的合理性.     

紫外图像处理方法

针对紫外成像存在噪声干扰的问题,为获取高品质的紫外图像及对目标准确检测,对典型紫外成像系统进行了研究。分析了紫外成像噪声干扰原因,建立了紫外目标场景模型。并以此研究紫外图像复原方法,对单幅图像进行门限处理,去掉背景噪声。然后对连续多帧图像进行均值处理和时域递归滤波,阈值分割后得到较好的图像输出。从图像输出结果可以看出,多帧图像均值处理和时域递归滤波都能有效地去除紫外图像中的随机噪声,特别是时域递归滤波方法对于图像复原有更好的效果。