Localizing text in scene images by boundary clustering, stroke segmentation, and string fragment classification

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to extract text regions from scene images with complex backgrounds and multiple text appearances. This framework consists of three main steps: boundary clustering (BC), stroke segmentation, and string fragment classification. In BC, we propose a new bigram-color-uniformity-based method to model both text and attachment surface, and cluster edge pixels based on color pairs and spatial positions into boundary layers. Then, stroke segmentation is performed at each boundary layer by color assignment to extract character candidates. We propose two algorithms to combine the structural analysis of text stroke with color assignment and filter out background interferences. Further, we design a robust string fragment classification based on Gabor-based text features. The features are obtained from feature maps of gradient, stroke distribution, and stroke width. The proposed framework of text localization is evaluated on scene images, born-digital images, broadcast video images, and images of handheld objects captured by blind persons. Experimental results on respective datasets demonstrate that the framework outperforms state-of-the-art localization algorithms.     

Image information and visual quality.

Measurement of visual quality is of fundamental importance to numerous image and video processing applications. The goal of quality assessment (QA) research is to design algorithms that can automatically assess the quality of images or videos in a perceptually consistent manner. Image QA algorithms generally interpret image quality as fidelity or similarity with a "reference" or "perfect" image in some perceptual space. Such "full-reference" QA methods attempt to achieve consistency in quality prediction by modeling salient physiological and psychovisual features of the human visual system (HVS), or by signal fidelity measures. In this paper, we approach the image QA problem as an information fidelity problem. Specifically, we propose to quantify the loss of image information to the distortion process and explore the relationship between image information and visual quality. QA systems are invariably involved with judging the visual quality of "natural" images and videos that are meant for "human consumption." Researchers have developed sophisticated models to capture the statistics of such natural signals. Using these models, we previously presented an information fidelity criterion for image QA that related image quality with the amount of information shared between a reference and a distorted image. In this paper, we propose an image information measure that quantifies the information that is present in the reference image and how much of this reference information can be extracted from the distorted image. Combining these two quantities, we propose a visual information fidelity measure for image QA. We validate the performance of our algorithm with an extensive subjective study involving 779 images and show that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art image QA algorithms by a sizeable margin in our simulations. The code and the data from the subjective study are available at the LIVE website.     

RLP-AGMC: Robust label propagation for saliency detection based on an adaptive graph with multiview connections

There have been remarkable improvements in the salient object detection in the recent years. During the past few years, graph-based saliency detection algorithms have been proposed and made advances. Nevertheless, most of the state-of-the-art graph-based approaches are usually designed with low-level features, misleading assumption, fixed predefined graph structure and weak affinity matrix, which determine that they are not robust enough to handle images with complex or cluttered background.In this paper, we propose a robust label propagation-based mechanism for salient object detection throughout an adaptive graph to tackle above issues. Low-level features as well as deep features are integrated into the proposed framework to measure the similarity between different nodes. In addition, a robust mechanism is presented to calculate seeds based on the distribution of salient regions, which can achieve desirable results even if the object is in contact with the image boundary and the image scene is complex. Then, an adaptive graph with multiview connections is constructed based on different cues to learn the graph affinity matrix, which can better capture the characteristics between spatially adjacent and distant regions. Finally, a novel RLP-AGMC model, i.e. robust label propagation throughout an adaptive graph with multiview connections, is put forward to calculate saliency maps in combination with the obtained seed vectors. Comprehensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate the proposed method outperforms fourteen existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of various evaluation metrics.     

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.     

Salient object detection using local,global and high contrast graphs

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-graph-based method for salient object detection in natural images. Starting from image decomposition via a superpixel generation algorithm, we utilize color, spatial and background label to calculate edge weight matrix of the graphs. By considering superpixels as the nodes and region similarities as the edge weights, local, global and high contrast graphs are created. Then, an integration technique is applied to form the saliency maps using degree vectors of the graphs. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets show that the proposed unsupervised method outperforms the several different state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.     

Edge-based color constancy.

Color constancy is the ability to measure colors of objects independent of the color of the light source. A well-known color constancy method is based on the gray-world assumption which assumes that the average reflectance of surfaces in the world is achromatic. In this paper, we propose a new hypothesis for color constancy namely the gray-edge hypothesis, which assumes that the average edge difference in a scene is achromatic. Based on this hypothesis, we propose an algorithm for color constancy. Contrary to existing color constancy algorithms, which are computed from the zero-order structure of images, our method is based on the derivative structure of images. Furthermore, we propose a framework which unifies a variety of known (gray-world, max-RGB, Minkowski norm) and the newly proposed gray-edge and higher order gray-edge algorithms. The quality of the various instantiations of the framework is tested and compared to the state-of-the-art color constancy methods on two large data sets of images recording objects under a large number of different light sources. The experiments show that the proposed color constancy algorithms obtain comparable results as the state-of-the-art color constancy methods with the merit of being computationally more efficient.     

夜视图像自动彩色化源图选择算法

研究可供夜视图像进行色彩传递的自然彩色源图选择算法。利用Gabor滤波器能够模拟生物视觉的特性以及夜视图像的纹理特征,对结合Gabor滤波器和灰度共生矩阵源图检索算法做出了改进,提出了一种结合Gabor滤波器和灰度梯度共生矩阵的源图选择算法。最后对这两种算法和亮度梯度二次采样算法进行了比较,实验结果证明,改进的算法远远优于其他两个,减少了图像色彩传递应用过程的人工干预程度,大大提高了自动化水平。     

A new deep spatial transformer convolutional neural network for image saliency detection

In this paper we propose a novel deep spatial transformer convolutional neural network (Spatial Net) framework for the detection of salient and abnormal areas in images. The proposed method is general and has three main parts: (1) context information in the image is captured by using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to automatically learn high-level features; (2) to better adapt the CNN model to the saliency task, we redesign the feature sub-network structure to output a 6-dimensional transformation matrix for affine transformation based on the spatial transformer network. Several local features are extracted, which can effectively capture edge pixels in the salient area, meanwhile embedded into the above model to reduce the impact of highlighting background regions; (3) finally, areas of interest are detected by means of the linear combination of global and local feature information. Experimental results demonstrate that Spatial Nets obtain superior detection performance over state-of-the-art algorithms on two popular datasets, requiring less memory and computation to achieve high performance.     

AFLNet: Adversarial focal loss network for RGB-D salient object detection

Because salient objects usually have fewer data in a scene, the problem of class imbalance is often encountered in salient object detection (SOD). In order to address this issue and achieve the consistent salient objects, we propose an adversarial focal loss network with improving generative adversarial networks for RGB-D SOD (called AFLNet), in which color and depth branches constitute the generator to achieve the saliency map, and adversarial branch with high-order potentials, instead of pixel-wise loss function, refines the output of the generator to obtain contextual information of objects. We infer the adversarial focal loss function to solve the problem of foreground–background class imbalance. To sufficiently fuse the high-level features of color and depth cues, an inception model is adopted in deep layers. We conduct a large number of experiments using our proposed model and its variants, and compare them with state-of-the-art methods. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results exhibit that our proposed approach can improve the accuracy of salient object detection and achieve the consistent objects.     

基于全卷积网络的语义显著性区域检测方法研究

基于底层视觉特征和先验知识的显著性区域检测算法难以检测一些复杂的显著性目标,人的视觉系统能分辨这些目标是由于其中包含丰富的语义知识.本文构建了一个基于全卷积结构的语义显著性区域检测网络,用数据驱动的方式构建从图像底层特征到人类语义认知的映射,提取语义显著性区域.针对网络提取的语义显著性区域的缺点,本文进一步引入颜色信息、目标边界信息、空间一致性信息获得准确的超像素级前景和背景概率.最后提出一个优化模型融合前景和背景概率信息、语义信息、空间一致性信息得到最终的显著性区域图.在6个数据集上与15种最新算法的比较实验证明了本文算法的有效性和鲁棒性.     

Salient edge and region aware image retargeting

The purpose of image retargeting is to automatically adapt a given image to fit the size of various displays without introducing severe visual distortions. The seam carving method can effectively achieve this task and it needs to define image importance to detect the salient context of images. In this paper we present a new image importance map and a new seam criterion for image retargeting. We first decompose an image into a cartoon and a texture part. The higher order statistics (HOS) on the cartoon part provide reliable salient edges. We construct a salient object window and a distance dependent weight to modify the HOS. The weighted HOS effectively protects salient objects from distortion by seam carving. We also propose a new seam criterion which tends to spread seam uniformly in nonsallient regions and helps to preserve large scale geometric structures. We call our method salient edge and region aware image retargeting (SERAR). We evaluate our method visually, and compare the results with related methods. Our method performs well in retargeting images with cluttered backgrounds and in preserving large scale structures.     

Image Segmentation Based on GrabCut Framework Integrating Multiscale Nonlinear Structure Tensor

In this paper, we propose an interactive color natural image segmentation method. The method integrates color feature with multiscale nonlinear structure tensor texture (MSNST) feature and then uses GrabCut method to obtain the segmentations. The MSNST feature is used to describe the texture feature of an image and integrated into GrabCut framework to overcome the problem of the scale difference of textured images. In addition, we extend the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to MSNST feature and GMM based on MSNST is constructed to describe the energy function so that the texture feature can be suitably integrated into GrabCut framework and fused with the color feature to achieve the more superior image segmentation performance than the original GrabCut method. For easier implementation and more efficient computation, the symmetric KL divergence is chosen to produce the estimates of the tensor statistics instead of the Riemannian structure of the space of tensor. The Conjugate norm was employed using Locality Preserving Projections (LPP) technique as the distance measure in the color space for more discriminating power. An adaptive fusing strategy is presented to effectively adjust the mixing factor so that the color and MSNST texture features are efficiently integrated to achieve more robust segmentation performance. Last, an iteration convergence criterion is proposed to reduce the time of the iteration of GrabCut algorithm dramatically with satisfied segmentation accuracy. Experiments using synthesis texture images and real natural scene images demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.     

Superpixel based color contrast and color distribution driven salient object detection

Color is the most informative low-level feature and might convey tremendous saliency information of a given image. Unfortunately, color feature is seldom fully exploited in the previous saliency models. Motivated by the three basic disciplines of a salient object which are respectively center distribution prior, high color contrast to surroundings and compact color distribution, in this paper, we design a comprehensive salient object detection system which takes the advantages of color contrast together with color distribution and outputs high quality saliency maps. The overall procedure flow of our unified framework contains superpixel pre-segmentation, color contrast and color distribution computation, combination, and final refinement.In color contrast saliency computation, we calculate center-surrounded color contrast and then employ the distribution prior in order to select correct color components. A global saliency smoothing procedure that is based on superpixel regions is introduced as well. This processing step preferably alleviates the saliency distortion problem, leading to the entire object being highlighted uniformly. Finally, a saliency refinement approach is adopted to eliminate artifacts and recover unconnected parts within the combined saliency maps.In visual comparison, our method produces higher quality saliency maps which stress out the total object meanwhile suppress background clutter. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments show our approach outperforms 8 state-of-the-art methods, achieving the highest precision rate 96% (3% improvement from the current highest), when evaluated via one of the most popular data sets. Excellent content-aware image resizing also could be achieved using our saliency maps.     

采用深度学习与图像融合混合实现策略的低照度图像增强算法

提出了一种采用深度学习与图像融合混合实现策略的低照度图像增强算法.首先,利用照射分量预测模型直接基于输入的低照度图像快速地估计出其最佳照射分量并在Retinex模型框架下获得一张整体上适度曝光图像;其次,将低照度图像本身及它的过曝光图像作为适度曝光图像的修正补充图像参与融合;最后,采用局部结构化融合和色度加权融合机制技...     

Salient object detection via a boundary-guided graph structure

Graph-based salient object detection methods have gained more and more attention recently. However, existing works fail to separate effectively salient object and background in some challenging scenes. Inspired by this observation, we propose an effective salient object detection method based on a novel boundary-guided graph structure. More specifically, the input image is firstly segmented into a series of superpixels. Then we integrate two prior cues to generate the coarse saliency map, a novel weighting mechanism is proposed to balance the proportion of two prior cues according to their performance. Secondly, we propose a novel boundary-guided graph structure to explore deeply the intrinsic relevance between superpixels. Based on the proposed graph structure, an iterative propagation mechanism is constructed to refine the coarse saliency map. Experimental results on four datasets show adequately the superiority of the proposed method than other state-of-the-art methods.     

A wrapper-based approach to image segmentation and classification.

The traditional processing flow of segmentation followed by classification in computer vision assumes that the segmentation is able to successfully extract the object of interest from the background image. It is extremely difficult to obtain a reliable segmentation without any prior knowledge about the object that is being extracted from the scene. This is further complicated by the lack of any clearly defined metrics for evaluating the quality of segmentation or for comparing segmentation algorithms. We propose a method of segmentation that addresses both of these issues, by using the object classification subsystem as an integral part of the segmentation. This will provide contextual information regarding the objects to be segmented, as well as allow us to use the probability of correct classification as a metric to determine the quality of the segmentation. We view traditional segmentation as a filter operating on the image that is independent of the classifier, much like the filter methods for feature selection. We propose a new paradigm for segmentation and classification that follows the wrapper methods of feature selection. Our method wraps the segmentation and classification together, and uses the classification accuracy as the metric to determine the best segmentation. By using shape as the classification feature, we are able to develop a segmentation algorithm that relaxes the requirement that the object of interest to be segmented must be homogeneous in some low-level image parameter, such as texture, color, or grayscale. This represents an improvement over other segmentation methods that have used classification information only to modify the segmenter parameters, since these algorithms still require an underlying homogeneity in some parameter space. Rather than considering our method as, yet, another segmentation algorithm, we propose that our wrapper method can be considered as an image segmentation framework, within which existing image segmentation algorithms may be executed. We show the performance of our proposed wrapper-based segmenter on real-world and complex images of automotive vehicle occupants for the purpose of recognizing infants on the passenger seat and disabling the vehicle airbag. This is an interesting application for testing the robustness of our approach, due to the complexity of the images, and, consequently, we believe the algorithm will be suitable for many other real-world applications.     

Detection of GAN generated image using color gradient representation

With the development of generative adversarial network (GANs) technology, the technology of GAN generates images has evolved dramatically. Distinguishing these GAN generated images is challenging for the human eye. Moreover, the GAN generated fake images may cause some behaviors that endanger society and bring great security problems to society. Research on GAN generated image detection is still in the exploratory stage and many challenges remain. Motivated by the above problem, we propose a novel GAN image detection method based on color gradient analysis. We consider the difference in color information between real images and GAN generated images in multiple color spaces, and combined the gradient information and the directional texture information of the generated images to extract the gradient texture features for GAN generated images detection. Experimental results on PGGAN and StyleGAN2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves good performance, and is robust to other various perturbation attacks.     

Saliency detection based on singular value decomposition

Saliency detection has gained popularity in many applications, and many different approaches have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on singular value decomposition (SVD) for saliency detection. Our algorithm considers both the human-perception mechanism and the relationship between the singular values of an image decomposed by SVD and its salient regions. The key concept of our proposed algorithms is based on the fact that salient regions are the important parts of an image. The singular values of an image are divided into three groups: large, intermediate, and small singular values. We propose the hypotheses that the large singular values mainly contain information about the non-salient background and slight information about the salient regions, while the intermediate singular values contain most or even all of the saliency information. The small singular values contain little or even none of the saliency information. These hypotheses are validated by experiments. By regularization based on the average information, regularization using the leading largest singular values or regularization based on machine learning, the salient regions will become more conspicuous. In our proposed approach, learning-based methods are proposed to improve the accuracy of detecting salient regions in images. Gaussian filters are also employed to enhance the saliency information. Experimental results prove that our methods based on SVD achieve superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods for human-eye fixations, as well as salient-object detection, in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) score, the linear correlation coefficient (CC) score, the normalized scan-path saliency (NSS) score, the F-measure score, and visual quality.