SAR image processing using adaptive stack filter

Stack filters are a special case of non-linear filters. They have a good performance for filtering images with different types of noise while preserving edges and details. A stack filter decomposes an input image into several binary images according to a set of thresholds. Each binary image is filtered by a Boolean function. The Boolean function that characterizes an adaptive stack filter is optimal and is computed from a pair of images consisting of an ideal noiseless image and its noisy version. In this work the behavior of adaptive stack filters on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is evaluated. With this aim, the equivalent number of looks for stack filtered data are calculated to assess the speckle noise reduction capability of this filter. Then a classification of simulated and real SAR images is carried out on data filtered with a stack filter trained with selected samples. The results of a maximum likelihood classification of these data are evaluated and compared with the results of classifying images previously filtered using the Lee and the Frost filters.     

基于自适应堆滤波的边界检测

从被噪声干扰的图象中提取边界是图象测试与分析的关键之一。通常需要先滤除图象中的噪声，再用边界检测算子求出边界。本文介绍了一种边界直接检测法，即将边界检测与噪声滤波相结合，它是基于自适应堆滤波的边界检测法。首先非线性堆滤波器用于求出图象某象素点邻域内的灰度最大值与最小值的最优估计，然后以此两估计值之差代替原象素点灰度值。最后对之二值化求出边界。本文根据最小平均绝对误差准则，采用自适应方法求解堆滤波器。这种方法类似于线性自适应滤波器的ＬＭＳ方法，先任设一初始堆滤波器，利用期望图象与合噪声图象对堆滤波器进行迭代训练，最后求出最优化的自适应堆滤波器。文章最后给出了采用自适应堆滤波法求取图象边界的试验结果，表明这种方法可以有效地抑制各种分布的噪声干扰。     

Extracting watermarks from printouts captured with wide angles using computational photography

Thus far the research of print-cam robust watermarking methods has focused on finding new methods for embedding and extracting the watermark. However, the capturing process itself, has been neglected in scientific research. In this paper, we propose a solution for the situation when the watermarked image has been captured in a wide angle and the depth of focus of the camera is not deep enough to capture the whole scene in-focus resulting in unfocused areas. The solution proposed here relies on a subfield of computational photography, namely all-in-focus imaging. All-in-focus images are generated by fusing multiple images from the same scene with different focus distances together, so that the object being photographed is fully in focus. Traditionally, the images to be fused are selected by hand from the focal stack or the whole stack is used for building the all-in-focus image. In mobile phone applications, computational resources are limited and using the full focal stack would result in long processing times and the manual selection of images would not be practical. In addition, we propose a method for optimizing the size of the focal stack and automatically selecting appropriate images for fusion. It is shown here that a watermark can still be recovered from the reconstructed all-in-focus image accurately.     

A fast and memory-efficient Discrete Focal Stack Transform for plenoptic sensors

Plenoptic cameras are a new type of sensors that capture the four-dimensional lightfield of a scene. Processing the recorded lightfield, they extend the capabilities of current commercial cameras. Conventional cameras obtain photographs focusing at a determined depth. This photograph can be described through a projection of the four-dimensional lightfield onto two spatial dimensions. The collection of such images is the focal stack of the scene. The focal stack can be used to select an image refocused at a certain depth, to recover 3D information or to obtain all-in-focus images. There are several approaches to the computation of the focal stack. In this paper we propose a new technique to compute the focal stack by means of its frequency decomposition that can be seen as an extension of the Discrete Focal Stack Transform (DFST). This new approach decreases the computational complexity of the DFST maintaining an efficient memory use. Experimental results are provided to show the validity of the technique and its extension to 3D processing and all-in-focus image computation is also studied.     

微距摄影的多聚焦图像拍摄和融合

目的 对于微距摄影来说,由于微距镜头的景深有限,往往很难通过单幅照片获得拍摄对象全幅清晰的图像.因此要想获取全幅清晰的照片,就需要拍摄多幅具有不同焦点的微距照片,并对其进行融合.方法 传统的微距照片融合方法一般都假定需要融合的图像是已经配准好的,也并没有考虑微距图像的自动采集.因此提出了一种用于微距摄影的多聚焦图像采集和融合系统,该系统由3个部分组成.第1部分是一种微距图像拍摄装置,该硬件能够以高精度的方式拍摄物体在不同焦距下的微距照片.第2部分是一个基于不变特征的图像配准组件,它可以对在多个焦点下拍摄的微距图像进行自动配准和对齐.第3部分是一个基于图像金字塔的多聚焦图像融合组件,这个组件能够对已经对齐的微距照片进行融合,使得合成的图像具有更大的景深.该组件对基于图像金字塔的融合方法进行了扩展,提出了一种基于滤波的权重计算策略.通过将该权重计算与图像金字塔相结合,得到了一种基于多分辨率的多聚焦图像融合方法.结果 论文使用设计的拍摄装置采集了多组实验数据,用以验证系统硬件设计和软件设计的正确性,并使用主观和客观的方法对提出的系统进行评价.从主观评价来看,系统合成的微距图像不仅具有足够的景深,而且在高分辨率下也能够清晰地呈现物体微小的细节.从客观评价来看,通过将系统合成的微距图像与其他方法合成的微距图像进行量化比较,在标准差、信息熵和平均梯度3种评价标准中都是最优的.结论 实验结果表明,该系统是灵活和高效的,不仅能够对多幅具有不同焦点的微距图像进行自动采集、配准和融合,并且在图像融合的质量方面也能和其他方法相媲美.     

无人机航拍辅助数字乡村微网站的设计与实现

构建数字乡村是弥合城乡差距的一项有效措施,是实现农村信息化、现代化的必要措施,是实现乡村振兴战略全面建设小康社会的重要组成部分.本文采用无人机航拍获取正射影像及其经纬度信息,在利用Photoscan与ArcMap等软件进行拼接并制作出正射实景地图的基础上,构建分辨率达到厘米级的乡村数字地图,并进一步搭建集地理信息与数字资源于一体的数字乡村服务平台.以福建省东山县樟塘村为例,探索此类数字乡村综合服务平台的构建方案,并开发了可通过微信、支付宝、浏览器等移动端程序扫码访问的"数字樟塘"微网站.     

The Nonlinear Prefiltering and Difference of Estimates Approaches to Edge Detection: Applications of Stack Filters

The theory of stack filtering, which is a generalization of median filtering, is used in two different approaches to the detection of intensity edges in noisy images. The first approach is a generalization of median prefiltering: a stack filter or another median-type filter is used to smooth an image before a standard gradient estimator is applied. These prefiltering schemes retain the robustness of the median prefilter, but allow resolution of finer detail. The second approach, called the Difference of Estimates (DoE) approach, is a new formulation of a morphological scheme [Lee et al., IEEE Trans. Robotics Automat. RA-3, Apr. 1987, 142-156, Maragos and Ziff, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 12(5), May 1990.] which has proven to be very sensitive to impulsive noise. In this approach, stack filters are applied to a noisy image to obtain local estimates of the dilated and eroded versions of the noise-free image. Thresholding the difference between these two estimates yields the edge map. We find, for example, that this approach yields results comparable to those obtained with the Canny operator for images with additive Gaussian noise, but works much better when the noise is impulsive. In both approaches, the stack filters employed are trained to be optimal on images and noise that are "typical" examples of the target image. The robustness of stack filters leads to good performance for the target image, even when the statistics of the noise and/or image vary from those used in training. This is verified with extensive simulations.     

Segmentation of volumetric tissue images using constrained active contour models

In this article we describe an application of active contour model for the segmentation of 3D histo-pathological images. The 3D images of a thick tissue specimen are obtained as a stack of optical sections using confocal laser beam scanning microscope (CLSM). We have applied noise reduction and feature enhancement methods so that a smooth and slowly varying potential surface is obtained for proper convergence. To increase the capture range of the potential surface, we use a combination of distance potential and the diffused gradient potential as external forces. It has been shown that the region-based information obtained from low-level segmentation can be applied to reduce the adverse influence of the neighbouring nucleus having a strong boundary feature. We have also shown that, by increasing the axial resolution of the image stack, we can automatically propagate the optimum active contour of one image slice to its neighbouring image slices as an appropriate initial model. Results on images of prostate tissue section are presented.     

Motion-Blurred Image Restoration Based on Joint Invertibility of PSFs

To implement restoration in a single motion blurred image, the PSF (Point Spread Function) is difficult to estimate and the image deconvolution is ill-posed as a result that a good recovery effect cannot be obtained. Considering that several different PSFs can get joint invertibility to make restoration well-posed, we proposed a motion-blurred image restoration method based on joint invertibility of PSFs by means of computational photography. Firstly, we designed a set of observation device which composed by multiple cameras with the same parameters to shoot the moving target in the same field of view continuously to obtain the target images with the same background. The target images have the same brightness, but different exposure time and different motion blur length. It is easy to estimate the blur PSFs of the target images make use of the sequence frames obtained by one camera. According to the motion blur superposition feature of the target and its background, the complete blurred target images can be extracted from the observed images respectively. Finally, for the same target images with different PSFs, the iterative restoration is solved by joint solution of multiple images in spatial domain. The experiments showed that the moving target observation device designed by this method had lower requirements on hardware conditions, and the observed images are more convenient to use joint-PSF solution for image restoration, and the restoration results maintained details well and had lower signal noise ratio (SNR).     

Constrained connectivity for hierarchical image decomposition and simplification

This paper introduces an image decomposition and simplification method based on the constrained connectivity paradigm. According to this paradigm, two pixels are said to be connected if they comply to a series of constraints defined in terms of simple measures such as the maximum grey level differences over well-defined pixel paths and regions. The resulting connectivity relation generates a unique partition of the image definition domain. The simplification of the image is then achieved by setting each segment of the partition to the mean value of the pixels falling within this segment. Fine to coarse partition hierarchies (and therefore images of increasing degree of simplification) are produced by varying the threshold value associated with each connectivity constraint. The paper also includes a generalisation to multichannel images, applications, a review of related image segmentation techniques, and pseudo-code for an implementation based on queue and stack data structures.     

Specular Highlight Removal for Real‐world Images

Removing specular highlight in an image is a fundamental research problem in computer vision and computer graphics. While various methods have been proposed, they typically do not work well for real‐world images due to the presence of rich textures, complex materials, hard shadows, occlusions and color illumination, etc. In this paper, we present a novel specular highlight removal method for real‐world images. Our approach is based on two observations of the real‐world images: (i) the specular highlight is often small in size and sparse in distribution; (ii) the remaining diffuse image can be represented by linear combination of a small number of basis colors with the sparse encoding coefficients. Based on the two observations, we design an optimization framework for simultaneously estimating the diffuse and specular highlight images from a single image. Specifically, we recover the diffuse components of those regions with specular highlight by encouraging the encoding coefficients sparseness using L₀ norm. Moreover, the encoding coefficients and specular highlight are also subject to the non‐negativity according to the additive color mixing theory and the illumination definition, respectively. Extensive experiments have been performed on a variety of images to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority over the previous methods.     

Thin Cloud Removal for Single RGB Aerial Image

Acquired above variable clouds, aerial images contain the components of ground reflection and cloud effect. Due to the non‐uniformity, clouds in aerial images are even harder to remove than haze in terrestrial images. This paper proposes a divide‐and‐conquer scheme to remove the thin translucent clouds in a single RGB aerial image. Based on colour attenuation prior, we design a kind of veiling metric that indicates the local concentration of clouds effectively. By this metric, an aerial image containing thickness‐varied clouds is segmented into multiple regions. Each region is veiled by clouds of nearly‐equal concentration, and hence subject to common assumptions, such as boundary constraint on transmission. The atmospheric light in each region is estimated by the modified local colour‐line model and composed into a spatially‐varying airlight map for the entire image. Then scene transmission is estimated and further refined by a weighted ‐norm based contextual regularization. Finally, we recover ground reflection via the atmospheric scattering model. We verify our cloud removal method on a number of aerial images containing thin clouds and compare our results with classical single‐image dehazing methods and the state‐of‐the‐art learning‐based declouding method, respectively.     

基于SIFT算法的室内全景图拼接

室内全景图像拼接采用SIFT特征点进行图像匹配与融合。由于相机镜头视野范围有限,需要多张具有重合区域不同角度图像进行拼接,以获得完整的全景图像。首先对多张原图像进行图像增强和噪声滤波的预处理,以减少特征点提取时的干扰因素;再将多张图像压入堆栈,采用SIFT算法提取每张图像的特征点;使用FLANN快速最近邻搜索包进行最近邻特征点匹配,最后进行图像融合。试验结果表明该方法能够很好地实现室内全景图像的拼接。     

Progressive Refinement Imaging

This paper presents a novel technique for progressive online integration of uncalibrated image sequences with substantial geometric and/or photometric discrepancies into a single, geometrically and photometrically consistent image. Our approach can handle large sets of images, acquired from a nearly planar or infinitely distant scene at different resolutions in object domain and under variable local or global illumination conditions. It allows for efficient user guidance as its progressive nature provides a valid and consistent reconstruction at any moment during the online refinement process. Our approach avoids global optimization techniques, as commonly used in the field of image refinement, and progressively incorporates new imagery into a dynamically extendable and memory-efficient Laplacian pyramid. Our image registration process includes a coarse homography and a local refinement stage using optical flow. Photometric consistency is achieved by retaining the photometric intensities given in a reference image, while it is being refined. Globally blurred imagery and local geometric inconsistencies due to, e.g. motion are detected and removed prior to image fusion. We demonstrate the quality and robustness of our approach using several image and video sequences, including handheld acquisition with mobile phones and zooming sequences with consumer cameras.     

复杂性算法在图像景深扩展中的应用研究

由于光学系统受景深小的物理性能限制,对纵向变化范围较大的物体,所拍图片为局部清晰。利用Kolmogorov复杂性测度来度量不同聚焦层面形成的序列图像中对象的局部清晰程度,将序列图像聚焦清晰的部分提取并合并出一幅全清晰图像,实现景深扩展,得到清晰的全景深图像。实验证明,将复杂性测度应用于景深扩展,具有广泛的应用前景。     

Semantic Segmentation for Line Drawing Vectorization Using Neural Networks

In this work, we present a method to vectorize raster images of line art. Inverting the rasterization procedure is inherently ill‐conditioned, as there exist many possible vector images that could yield the same raster image. However, not all of these vector images are equally useful to the user, especially if performing further edits is desired. We therefore define the problem of computing an instance segmentation of the most likely set of paths that could have created the raster image. Once the segmentation is computed, we use existing vectorization approaches to vectorize each path, and then combine all paths into the final output vector image. To determine which set of paths is most likely, we train a pair of neural networks to provide semantic clues that help resolve ambiguities at intersection and overlap regions. These predictions are made considering the full context of the image, and are then globally combined by solving a Markov Random Field (MRF). We demonstrate the flexibility of our method by generating results on character datasets, a synthetic random line dataset, and a dataset composed of human drawn sketches. For all cases, our system accurately recovers paths that adhere to the semantics of the drawings.     

Wavelet Flow: Optical Flow Guided Wavelet Facial Image Fusion

Estimating the correspondence between the images using optical flow is the key component for image fusion, however, computing optical flow between a pair of facial images including backgrounds is challenging due to large differences in illumination, texture, color and background in the images. To improve optical flow results for image fusion, we propose a novel flow estimation method, wavelet flow, which can handle both the face and background in the input images. The key idea is that instead of computing flow directly between the input image pair, we estimate the image flow by incorporating multi‐scale image transfer and optical flow guided wavelet fusion. Multi‐scale image transfer helps to preserve the background and lighting detail of input, while optical flow guided wavelet fusion produces a series of intermediate images for further fusion quality optimizing. Our approach can significantly improve the performance of the optical flow algorithm and provide more natural fusion results for both faces and backgrounds in the images. We evaluate our method on a variety of datasets to show its high outperformance.     

基于半色调技术的(2,2)可视密码方案

为解决传统可视密码像素膨胀及分存图像无意义等问题,提出一个基于半色调技术的（2,2）可视密码方案。方案中密图为黑白反色图像,利用半色调技术将一幅灰度图像处理后的半色调图像作为掩盖图像一,然后对其进行反色运算得到掩盖图像二,根据密图修改掩盖图像生成分存图像,叠加分存图像恢复密图。该方案符合可视密码解密简单的特性且分存图像有意义、没有引入任何像素膨胀。     

A Collaborative Digital Pathology System for Multi‐Touch Mobile and Desktop Computing Platforms

Collaborative slide image viewing systems are becoming increasingly important in pathology applications such as telepathology and E‐learning. Despite rapid advances in computing and imaging technology, current digital pathology systems have limited performance with respect to remote viewing of whole slide images on desktop or mobile computing devices. In this paper we present a novel digital pathology client–server system that supports collaborative viewing of multi‐plane whole slide images over standard networks using multi‐touch‐enabled clients. Our system is built upon a standard HTTP web server and a MySQL database to allow multiple clients to exchange image and metadata concurrently. We introduce a domain‐specific image‐stack compression method that leverages real‐time hardware decoding on mobile devices. It adaptively encodes image stacks in a decorrelated colour space to achieve extremely low bitrates (0.8 bpp) with very low loss of image quality. We evaluate the image quality of our compression method and the performance of our system for diagnosis with an in‐depth user study.     

面向纹理平滑的方向性滤波尺度预测模型

目的 传统图像处理的纹理滤波方法难以区分梯度较强的纹理与物体的结构,而深度学习方法使用的训练集生成方式不够合理,且模型表示方式比较粗糙,为此本文设计了一种面向纹理平滑的方向性滤波尺度预测模型,并生成了含有标签的新的纹理滤波数据集。方法 在现有结构图像中逐连通区域填充多种纹理图,生成有利于模型训练的纹理滤波数据集。设计了方向性滤波尺度预测模型,该模型包含尺度感知子网络和图像平滑子网络。前者预测得到的滤波尺度图不但体现了该像素与周围像素是否为同一纹理,而且还隐含了该像素是否为结构像素的信息。后者以滤波尺度图和原图的堆叠作为输入,凭借少量的卷积层快速得出纹理滤波的结果。结果 在本文的纹理滤波数据集上与7个算法进行比较,峰值信噪比(peak signal to noise ratio, PSNR)与结构相似度(structural similarity, SSIM)分别高于第2名2.79 dB、0.0133,均方误差(mean squared error, MSE)低于第2名6.863 8,运算速度快于第2名0.002 s。在其他数据集上的实验对比也显示出本文算法更好地保持结构与平滑纹理。通过...