Rician noise removal from MR images using novel adapted selective non-local means filter

The reduction of rician noise from MR images without degradation of the underlying image features has attracted much attention and has a strong potential in several application domains including medical image processing. Interpretation of MR images is difficult due to their tendency to gain rician noise during acquisition. In this work, we proposed a novel selective non-local means algorithm for noise suppression of MR images while preserving the image features as much as possible. We have used morphological gradient operators that separate the image high frequency areas from smooth areas. Later, we have applied novel selective NLM filter with optimal parameter values for different frequency regions of image to remove the noise. A method of selective weight matrix is also proposed to preserve the image features against smoothing. The results of experimentation performed using proposed adapted selective filter prove the soundness of the method. We compared results with the results of many well known techniques presented in literature like NLM with optimized parameters, wavelet based de-noising and anisotropic diffusion filter and discussed the improvements achieved.     

Construction and analysis of a generalized contact center model

We construct and study a model of arrival and servicing of calls in modern contact centers. The model takes into account that servicing staff divides into operators and consultants, that a call can be repeated if all operators, consultants, or access lines are busy, and also due to an unsuccessful end of waiting time, and the presence of voice answering machines. We define characteristics of call servicing, consider a method for computing them based on constructing and solving a system of statistical equilibrium equations. We propose a procedure to estimate the intensity of primary calls arrival based on measurements of general characteristics of call servicing in the contact center. We consider specific features of planning for the number of operators and access lines.     

Segmentation and adaptive assimilation for detail-preserving display of high-dynamic range images

Realistic display of high-dynamic range images is a difficult problem. Previous methods for high-dynamic range image display suffer from halo artifacts or are computationally expensive. We present a novel method for computing local adaptation luminance that can be used with several different visual adaptation-based tone-reproduction operators for displaying visually accurate high-dynamic range images. The method uses fast image segmentation, grouping, and graph operations to generate local adaptation luminance. Results on several images show excellent dynamic range compression, while preserving detail without the presence of halo artifacts. With adaptive assimilation, the method can be configured to bring out a high-dynamic range appearance in the display image. The method is efficient in terms of processor and memory use.     

Robust watermarking of facial images based on salient geometricpattern matching

We introduce a novel method for embedding and detecting a chaotic watermark in the digital spatial domain of color facial images, based on localizing salient facial features. These features define a certain area on which the watermark is embedded and detected. An assessment of the watermarking robustness is done experimentally, by testing resistance to several attacks, such as compression, filtering, noise addition, scaling, cropping and rotation     

Adaptive application of feature detection operators based on image variance

It is well known that the strength of a feature in an image may depend on the scale at which the appropriate detection operator is applied. It is also the case that many features in images exist significantly over a limited range of scales, and, of particular interest here, that the most salient scale may vary spatially over the feature. Hence, when designing feature detection operators, it is necessary to consider the requirements for both the systematic development and adaptive application of such operators over scale- and image-domains. We present an overview to the design of scalable derivative edge detectors, based on the finite element method, that addresses the issues of method and scale-adaptability. The finite element approach allows us to formulate scalable image derivative operators that can be implemented using a combination of piecewise-polynomial and Gaussian basis functions. The general adaptive technique may be applied to a range of operators. Here we evaluate the approach using image gradient operators, and we present comparative qualitative and quantitative results for both first and second order derivative methods.     

Content-adaptive feature extraction using image variance

The problem of scale is of fundamental interest in image processing, as the features that we visually perceive and find meaningful vary significantly depending on their size and extent. It is well known that the strength of a feature in an image may depend on the scale at which the appropriate detection operator is applied. It is also the case that many features in images exist significantly over a limited range of scales, and, of particular interest here, that the most salient scale may vary spatially over the feature. Hence, when designing feature detection operators, it is necessary to consider the requirements for both the systematic development and adaptive application of such operators over scale- and image-domains.

We present a new approach to the design of scalable derivative edge detectors, based on the finite element method, that addresses the issues of method and scale adaptability. The finite element approach allows us to formulate scalable image derivative operators that can be implemented using a combination of piecewise-polynomial and Gaussian basis functions. The issue of scale is addressed by partitioning the image in order to identify local key scales at which significant edge points may exist. This is achieved by consideration of empirically designed functions of local image variance.     

A geometric approach to shape from defocus

We introduce a novel approach to shape from defocus, i.e., the problem of inferring the three-dimensional (3D) geometry of a scene from a collection of defocused images. Typically, in shape from defocus, the task of extracting geometry also requires deblurring the given images. A common approach to bypass this task relies on approximating the scene locally by a plane parallel to the image (the so-called equifocal assumption). We show that this approximation is indeed not necessary, as one can estimate 3D geometry while avoiding deblurring without strong assumptions on the scene. Solving the problem of shape from defocus requires modeling how light interacts with the optics before reaching the imaging surface. This interaction is described by the so-called point spread function (PSF). When the form of the PSF is known, we propose an optimal method to infer 3D geometry from defocused images that involves computing orthogonal operators which are regularized via functional singular value decomposition. When the form of the PSF is unknown, we propose a simple and efficient method that first learns a set of projection operators from blurred images and then uses these operators to estimate the 3D geometry of the scene from novel blurred images. Our experiments on both real and synthetic images show that the performance of the algorithm is relatively insensitive to the form of the PSF Our general approach is to minimize the Euclidean norm of the difference between the estimated images and the observed images. The method is geometric in that we reduce the minimization to performing projections onto linear subspaces, by using inner product structures on both infinite and finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. Both proposed algorithms involve only simple matrix-vector multiplications which can be implemented in real-time.     

Generalized triangular norm and conorm aggregation operators on ordinal spaces

We describe the basic features of the t-norm operator and then introduce a family of t-norm operators that are defined on an ordinal space. We then do the same for the t-conorms. We note the strong limitation that the requirement of associativity places on the t-norm and t-conorm operators. We particularly note how it limits our ability to model different types of reinforcement. We then define a generalization of the t-conorm aggregation operator, which relaxes the requirement of associativity, we denote these operators as GENOR operators. We show that these operators have the same functionality as the t-conorm. We provide some examples of GENOR operators which allow us to control the reinforcement process. We define a related extension for the t-norm, the GENAND operator and provide some examples.     

Invariant Gabor-based interest points detector under geometric transformation

This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting interest points invariant to rotation and scale using Gabor wavelet. Our scale and rotational invariant interest points detector is produced based on a multi-scale representation by selecting points at different scales from a combination of multi-orientations response maps using a non-maximum suppressing technique. We present a comparative evaluation of our proposed detector with the existing detectors. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms other methods under different viewpoint angles and provides a comparable results to the existing methods under scale changes for a set of test images with different geometric transformations.     

General-purpose curvilinear object detection with fuzzy mathematical morphology

Curvilinear object detection is the common denominator of several applications. Some illustrative examples are road detection from aerial or satellite images, human airways from volumetric 3D scans or vascular structures in eye-fundus images. In this work, we propose two general-purpose curvilinear object detectors that may serve as building blocks for application-specific systems. To do so, we employ fuzzy mathematical morphology operators due to their robustness with respect to uncertainty and noise, and the trade-off they offer between expressive power and computational requirements. The extraction of linear features is based on, respectively, the fuzzy hit-or-miss transform and the fuzzy top-hat transform. They can be customized depending on the width of the objects of interest. We compare these two approaches with other state-of-the-art, general-purpose curvilinear object detectors to highlight their strengths and shortcomings. Both detectors succeed at localizing the objects of interest in different greyscale images.     

Learning the Lie groups of visual invariance

A fundamental problem in biological and machine vision is visual invariance: How are objects perceived to be the same despite transformations such as translations, rotations, and scaling? In this letter, we describe a new, unsupervised approach to learning invariances based on Lie group theory. Unlike traditional approaches that sacrifice information about transformations to achieve invariance, the Lie group approach explicitly models the effects of transformations in images. As a result, estimates of transformations are available for other purposes, such as pose estimation and visuomotor control. Previous approaches based on first-order Taylor series expansions of images can be regarded as special cases of the Lie group approach, which utilizes a matrix-exponential-based generative model of images and can handle arbitrarily large transformations. We present an unsupervised expectation-maximization algorithm for learning Lie transformation operators directly from image data containing examples of transformations. Our experimental results show that the Lie operators learned by the algorithm from an artificial data set containing six types of affine transformations closely match the analytically predicted affine operators. We then demonstrate that the algorithm can also recover novel transformation operators from natural image sequences. We conclude by showing that the learned operators can be used to both generate and estimate transformations in images, thereby providing a basis for achieving visual invariance.     

Improving the interest operator for face recognition

When the conventional interest operator is used as the feature extraction procedure of face recognition, it has the following two shortcomings: first, though the purpose of the conventional interest operator is to use the intensity variation between neighboring pixels to represent the image, it cannot obtain all variation information between neighboring pixels. Second, under varying lighting conditions two images of the same face usually have different feature extraction results even though the face itself does not have obvious change. In this paper, we propose two new interest operators for face recognition, which are used to calculate the pixel intensity variation information of overlapping blocks produced from the original face image. The following two factors allow the new operators to perform better than the conventional interest operator: the first factor is that by taking the relative rather than absolute variation of the pixel intensity as the feature of an image block, the new operators can obtain robust block features. The second factor is that the scheme to partition an image into overlapping rather than non-overlapping blocks allows the proposed operators to produce more representation information for the face image. Experimental results show that the proposed operators offer significant accuracy improvement over the conventional interest operator.     

Gabor-based kernel PCA with fractional power polynomial models for face recognition

This paper presents a novel Gabor-based kernel Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method by integrating the Gabor wavelet representation of face images and the kernel PCA method for face recognition. Gabor wavelets first derive desirable facial features characterized by spatial frequency, spatial locality, and orientation selectivity to cope with the variations due to illumination and facial expression changes. The kernel PCA method is then extended to include fractional power polynomial models for enhanced face recognition performance. A fractional power polynomial, however, does not necessarily define a kernel function, as it might not define a positive semidefinite Gram matrix. Note that the sigmoid kernels, one of the three classes of widely used kernel functions (polynomial kernels, Gaussian kernels, and sigmoid kernels), do not actually define a positive semidefinite Gram matrix either. Nevertheless, the sigmoid kernels have been successfully used in practice, such as in building support vector machines. In order to derive real kernel PCA features, we apply only those kernel PCA eigenvectors that are associated with positive eigenvalues. The feasibility of the Gabor-based kernel PCA method with fractional power polynomial models has been successfully tested on both frontal and pose-angled face recognition, using two data sets from the FERET database and the CMU PIE database, respectively. The FERET data set contains 600 frontal face images of 200 subjects, while the PIE data set consists of 680 images across five poses (left and right profiles, left and right half profiles, and frontal view) with two different facial expressions (neutral and smiling) of 68 subjects. The effectiveness of the Gabor-based kernel PCA method with fractional power polynomial models is shown in terms of both absolute performance indices and comparative performance against the PCA method, the kernel PCA method with polynomial kernels, the kernel PCA method with fractional power polynomial models, the Gabor wavelet-based PCA method, and the Gabor wavelet-based kernel PCA method with polynomial kernels.     

Emulating human visual perception for measuring difference inimages using an SPN graph approach

This paper presents a new methodology for efficiently representing the content of images and comparing images by detecting and recording their visual differences. In particular, the methodology presented here is based on a stochastic Petri-net (SPN) graph approach able to extract and record local and global features from both images, compare them, and define the percentage of similarity. One of the features of the human visual perception is the detection of similarities between two images. The visual similarity is based on color, size, shape, and local and global topological changes of the image regions. Several methods dealing with image or object similarities have been proposed. The new feature of the method here is the partial emulation of the human observer's visual perception by recording differences extracted from different images. Results of the method described here are presented for a variety of images by using local and global noisy conditions.     

Multichannel image contrast enhancement based on linguistic rule-based intensificators

This study follows the direct approach to image contrast enhancement, which changes the image contrast at each its pixel and is more effective than the indirect approach that deals with image histograms. However, there are only few studies following the direct approach because, by its nature, it is very complex. Additionally, it is difficult to develop an effective method since it is required to keep a balance in maintaining local and global image features while changing the contrast at each individual pixel. Moreover, raw images obtained from many sources randomly influenced by many external factors can be considered as fuzzy uncertain data. In this context, we propose a novel method to apply and immediately handle expert fuzzy linguistic knowledge of image contrast enhancement to simulate human capability in using natural language. The formalism developed in the study is based on hedge algebras considered as a theory, which can immediately handle linguistic words of variables. This allows the proposed method to produce an image contrast intensificator from a given expert linguistic rule base. A technique to preserve global as well as local image features is proposed based on a fuzzy clustering method, which is applied for the first time in this field to reveal region image features of raw images. The projections of the obtained clusters on each channel are suitably aggregated to produce a new channel image considered as input of the pixelwise defined operators proposed in this study. Many experiments are performed to demonstrate the effect of the proposed method versus the counterparts considered.     

基于局部连接度和差异度算子的水平集纹理图像分割

目的 复杂纹理的图像分割一直是图像分割的难题,现有的一些纹理图像分割方法主要通过提取图像确定方向的灰度变化特征或者提取图像的局部灰度相似性特征得到特征图像,从而进行纹理图像的分割,然而,自然纹理中普遍存在局部形态相似和方向不确定的现象,导致现有方法不能准确地分割纹理图像。方法 本文提出局部连接算子和局部差异算子来描述局部纹理的形态相似性和局部纹理的差异度。一方面,通过设定一定阈值,将局部区域的灰度差异分为两类,分析两类差异的分布特征,从而提取图像的形态特性及局部连接度算子;另一方面,设置一种无方向性的灰度差异分析算子,提取图像局部的灰度差异值从而得到局部差异度算子。两个算子结合以更好地提取纹理图像的局部特征,然后通过融合局部相似度特征、局部差异度特征和灰度信息,构造水平集能量泛函,进而通过最小化能量泛函实现纹理图像分割。结果 相比基于Gabor变换、结构张量、局部相似度因子的纹理分割方法,提出的局部算子能够更好地区分自然图像的不同纹理区域,且对实验图像的平均分割准确率高达97%,远高于其他方法。因此,提出的模型对于自然纹理图像具有更好的分割效果。结论 本文提出了两种新颖的纹理特征局部描述子：局部连接度算子和局部差异度算子,能够有效地提取纹理特征,且有一定的互补性。实验表明,提出的方法对于复杂自然纹理图像具有良好的分割效果。     

Discrete Orthogonal Decomposition and Variational Fluid Flow Estimation

We exploit the mimetic finite difference method introduced by Hyman and Shashkov to present a framework for estimating vector fields and related scalar fields (divergence, curl) of physical interest from image sequences. Our approach provides a basis for consistent definitions of higher-order differential operators, for the analysis and a novel stability result concerning second-order div-curl regularizers, for novel variational schemes to the estimation of solenoidal (divergence-free) image flows, and to convergent numerical methods in terms of subspace corrections.     

Receptive field structures for recognition

Localized operators, like Gabor wavelets and difference-of-gaussian filters, are considered useful tools for image representation. This is due to their ability to form a sparse code that can serve as a basis set for high-fidelity reconstruction of natural images. However, for many visual tasks, the more appropriate criterion of representational efficacy is recognition rather than reconstruction. It is unclear whether simple local features provide the stability necessary to subserve robust recognition of complex objects. In this article, we search the space of two-lobed differential operators for those that constitute a good representational code under recognition and discrimination criteria. We find that a novel operator, which we call the dissociated dipole, displays useful properties in this regard. We describe simple computational experiments to assess the merits of such dipoles relative to the more traditional local operators. The results suggest that nonlocal operators constitute a vocabulary that is stable across a range of image transformations.