水下图像增强和修复算法综述

因受到光线散射和吸收、水体杂质、人工光源等因素影响,水下成像质量较低,很难满足生产作业的需求,而水下图像的增强和复原技术有助于提升水下机器视觉的能力.为帮助研究者掌握水下图像处理领域的研究方法和现有技术,对水下图像增强和复原方法进行综述.首先对水下图像存在的主要退化类型进行分析;分别对水下图像增强、复原的经典方法和最新进展进行总结,系统梳理了水下图像质量评测体系和公开数据集;最后对水下图像处理未来的研究趋势进行了展望.     

Eye detection in a facial image under pose variation based on multi-scale iris shape feature

The accurate location of eyes in a facial image is important to many human facial recognition-related applications, and has attracted considerable research interest in computer vision. However, most prevalent methods are based on the frontal pose of the face, where applying them to non-frontal poses can yield erroneous results.In this paper, we propose an eye detection method that can locate the eyes in facial images captured at various head poses. Our proposed method consists of two stages: eye candidate detection and eye candidate verification. In eye candidate detection, eye candidates are obtained by using multi-scale iris shape features and integral image. The size of the iris in face images varies as the head pose changes, and the proposed multi-scale iris shape feature method can detect the eyes in such cases. Since it utilizes the integral image, its computational cost is relatively low. The extracted eye candidates are then verified in the eye candidate verification stage using a support vector machine (SVM) based on the feature-level fusion of a histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and cell mean intensity features.We tested the performance of the proposed method using the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Pose, Expression, Accessories, and Lighting (CAS-PEAL) database and the Pointing'04 database. The results confirmed the superiority of our method over the conventional Haar-like detector and two hybrid eye detectors under relatively extreme head pose variations.     

Face detection in color images

Human face detection plays an important role in applications such as video surveillance, human computer interface, face recognition, and face image database management. We propose a face detection algorithm for color images in the presence of varying lighting conditions as well as complex backgrounds. Based on a novel lighting compensation technique and a nonlinear color transformation, our method detects skin regions over the entire image and then generates face candidates based on the spatial arrangement of these skin patches. The algorithm constructs eye, mouth, and boundary maps for verifying each face candidate. Experimental results demonstrate successful face detection over a wide range of facial variations in color, position, scale, orientation, 3D pose, and expression in images from several photo collections (both indoors and outdoors)     

单目视觉定位方法研究综述

根据单目视觉定位所用图像帧数不同把定位方法分为基于单帧图像的定位和基于双帧或多帧图像的定位两类。单帧图像定位常利用已知的点特征、直线特征或曲线特征与其在图像上的投影关系进行定位,其中用点特征和直线特征的定位方法简单有效而应用较多;基于双帧或多帧图像的定位方法因其操作复杂、精度不高而研究的还较少。通过对各方法的介绍和评述,为单目视觉定位问题的研究提供参考。     

基于视觉的水下管线识别与定位系统

论述了在水环境下如何通过视觉识别管线并给以精确的定位。提出了水下视觉系统的总体设计方案。在识别目标时,以目标的颜色为特征,并将颜色从ＲＧＢ窨转换到ＨＳＩ空间,使图象处理的速度和特征抽取的鲁棒性得到提高。对水下环境中点和线的精确定位进行了详细的分析,给出定位算法。最后的实验结果证明了算法的有效性。     

A CAD Model Based System for Object Recognition

3D object recognition is a difficult and yet an important problem in computer vision. A 3D object recognition system has two major components, namely: an object modeller and a system that performs the matching of stored representations to those derived from the sensed image. The performance of systems wherein the construction of object models is done by training from one or more images of the objects, has not been very satisfactory. Although objects used in a robotic workcell or in assembly processes have been designed using a CAD system, the vision systems used for recognition of these objects are independent of the CAD database. This paper proposes a scheme for interfacing the CAD database of objects and the computer vision processes used for recognising these objects. CAD models of objects are processed to generate vision oriented features that appear in the different views of the object and the same features are extracted from images of the object to identify the object and its pose.     

Natural-based underwater image color enhancement through fusion of swarm-intelligence algorithm

Underwater imagery suffers from severe effects due to selective attenuation and scattering effects when light travels through water medium. Such damages limit the ability of vision tasks and reduce image quality. There are a lot of enhancement methods to improve the quality of underwater image. However, most of the methods produce distortion effects in the output images. The proposed natural-based underwater image color enhancement (NUCE) method consists of four steps. The first step introduces a new approach to neutralize underwater color cast. The inferior color channels are enhanced based on gain factors, which are calculated by considering the differences between the superior and inferior color channels. In the second step, the dual-intensity images fusion based on average of mean and median values is proposed to produce lower-stretched and upper-stretched histograms. The composition between these histograms improves the image contrast significantly. Next, the swarm-intelligence based mean equalization is proposed to improve the naturalness of the output image. Through the fusion of swarm intelligence algorithm, the mean values of inferior color channels are adjusted to be closed to the mean value of superior color channel. Lastly, the unsharp masking technique is applied to sharpen the overall image. Experiments on underwater images that are captured under various conditions indicate that the proposed NUCE method produces better output image quality, while significantly overcoming other state-of-the-art methods.     

Pictorial Query Specification for Browsing Through Spatially Referenced Image Databases

A pictorial query specification technique that enables the formulation of complex pictorial queries for browsing through a collection of spatially referenced images is presented. It is distinguished from most other methods by the fact that in these methods the query image specifies a target database image in its entirety whereas in our approach the query image specifies the combination of objects that the target database image should contain rather than being treated as a whole image. The query objects are represented by shape features although other features such as color, texture or wavelets could also be used. Using our technique, it is possible to specify which particular objects should appear in the target images as well as how many occurrences of each object are required. Moreover, it is possible to specify the minimum required certainty of matching between query-image objects and database-image objects, as well as to impose spatial constraints that specify bounds on the distance between objects and the relative direction between them. These spatial constraints can also be used to specify other topological relations such as enclosure, intersection, overlap, etc. Each pictorial query is composed of one or more query images. Each query image is constructed by selecting the required query objects and positioning them according to the desired spatial configuration. Boolean combinations of two or more query images are also possible by use of AND and OR operators. A query image may be negated in order to specify conditions that should not be satisfied by the database images that are retrieved successfully. In addition, a capability is provided to specify whether the same instance of an object is to be used when it appears in more than one of the query images that make up the pictorial query, or whether two different instances are allowed. Several example queries are given that demonstrate the expressive power of this query specification method. An algorithm for retrieving all database images that conform to a given pictorial query specification is presented. The user interface for using this pictorial query specification method to browse the results in a map image database application is described and illustrated via screen shots.     

Expressions Recognition of North-East Indian (NEI) Faces

Facial expression is one of the major distracting factors for face recognition performance. Pose and illumination variations on face images also influence the performance of face recognition systems. The combination of three variations (facial expression, pose and illumination) seriously degrades the recognition accuracy. In this paper, three experimental protocols are designed in such a way that the successive performance degradation due to the increasing variations (expressions, expressions with illumination effect and expressions with illumination and pose effect) on face images can be examined. The whole experiment is carried out using North-East Indian (NEI) face images with the help of four well-known classification algorithms namely Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm (KNN), combination of Principal Component Analysis and Linear Discriminant Analysis (PCA + LDA), combination of Principal Component Analysis and K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm (PCA + KNN). The experimental observations are analyzed through confusion matrices and graphs. This paper also describes the creation of NEI facial expression database, which contains visual static face images of different ethnic groups of the North-East states. The database is useful for future researchers in the area of forensic science, medical applications, affective computing, intelligent environments, lie detection, psychiatry, anthropology, etc.     

基于区域分割的水下目标实时识别系统

提出了一种基于最优阈值分割算法的水下目标自动实时识别系统。该系统首先运用去噪、图像均衡等方法对实时摄取的水下图像进行预处理。然后运用基于遗传算法优化的 Otsu(即大津方法)最优阈值分割算法对所得图像进行区域分割并提取图像的特征向量。最后采用 BP 神经网络对提取的特征向量进行自动分类从而最终确定了水下目标的类型。水槽仿真试验表明该方法能够在恶劣的环境下自动地检测水下目标,而且该方法具有较强的抗光线干扰能力和较高的准确度。     

Visual enhancement of underwater images using Empirical Mode Decomposition

Most underwater vehicles are nowadays equipped with vision sensors. However, it is very likely that underwater images captured using optic cameras have poor visual quality due to lighting conditions in real-life applications. In such cases it is useful to apply image enhancement methods to increase visual quality of the images as well as enhance interpretability and visibility. In this paper, an Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) based underwater image enhancement algorithm is presented for this purpose. In the proposed approach, initially each spectral component of an underwater image is decomposed into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) using EMD. Then the enhanced image is constructed by combining the IMFs of spectral channels with different weights in order to obtain an enhanced image with increased visual quality. The weight estimation process is carried out automatically using a genetic algorithm that computes the weights of IMFs so as to optimize the sum of the entropy and average gradient of the reconstructed image. It is shown that the proposed approach provides superior results compared to conventional methods such as contrast stretching and histogram equalizing.     

Underwater image co-enhancement based on physical-guided transformer interaction

Most existing underwater image enhancement methods only focus on enhancing a single image. However, underwater images taken in the same scene often exhibit similar degradation characteristics, which can provide richer complementary information to each other. In this paper, a novel underwater image co-enhancement based on physical-guided Transformer interaction (UICE-PTI), which adopts a multi-scale encoder–decoder structure to effective mine the rich semantic information, is proposed. Specifically, considering that the degradation of underwater image is directly related to scene depth, the Dark Channel Prior-guided Transformer (DCPT) module is embedded into the framework before the preliminary feature extraction. Then, the convolution operation in the preliminary feature extraction is proposed for the local degradation of the underwater image. After that, considering the non-local and heterogeneous degradation of the underwater images across different channels and pixels, the CS-Transformer block with second-order statistics is proposed, which incorporates both channel and spatial Transformer modules. Furthermore, considering the rich complementary information between images of the same scene for enhancement, the Feature Transformer Interaction Module (FTIM) is proposed to capture the correlation between two branches in the network bottleneck layer. Additionally, the proposed UICE-PTI can also be extended to underwater stereo image enhancement. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed UICE-PTI and the effectiveness of each module.     

An effective method for detecting facial features and face in human-robot interaction

In this paper, an effective method of facial features detection is proposed for human-robot interaction (HRI). Considering the mobility of mobile robot, it is inevitable that any vision system for a mobile robot is bound to be faced with various imaging conditions such as pose variations, illumination changes, and cluttered backgrounds. To detecting face correctly under such difficult conditions, we focus on the local intensity pattern of the facial features. The characteristics of relatively dark and directionally different pattern can provide robust clues for detecting facial features. Based on this observation, we suggest a new directional template for detecting the major facial features, namely the two eyes and the mouth. By applying this template to a facial image, we can make a new convolved image, which we refer to as the edge-like blob map. One distinctive characteristic of this map image is that it provides the local and directional convolution values for each image pixel, which makes it easier to construct the candidate blobs of the major facial features without the information of facial boundary. Then, these candidates are filtered using the conditions associated with the spatial relationship of the two eyes and the mouth, and the face detection process is completed by applying appearance-based facial templates to the refined facial features. The overall detection results obtained with various color images and gray-level face database images demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method in HRI applications.     

Modeling and querying fuzzy spatiotemporal databases

Modeling spatiotemporal data, in particular fuzzy and complex spatial objects representing geographic entities and relations, is a topic of great importance in geographic information systems, computer vision, environmental data management systems, etc. Because of complex requirements, it is challenging to represent spatiotemporal data and its features in databases and to effectively query them. This article presents a new approach to model and query the spatiotemporal data of fuzzy spatial and complex objects and/or spatial relations. In our case study, we use a meteorological database application in an intelligent database architecture, which combines an object-oriented database with a knowledgebase for modeling and querying spatiotemporal objects.     

Error analysis in determining the centroids of circular objects in images

Detecting the size and/or location of circular object(s) in an image(s) has application in many areas, like, flow diagnostics, biomedical engineering, computer vision, etc. The detection accuracy of circular object(s) largely depends on the accuracy of centroiding algorithm and image preprocessing technique. In the present work, an error analysis is performed in determining the centroids of circular objects using synthetic images with eight different signal-to-noise ratios ranging from 2.7 to 17.8. In the first stage, four different centroiding algorithms, namely, Center of Mass, Weighted Center of Mass, Späth algorithm, and Hough transform, are studied and compared. The error analysis shows that Späth algorithm performs better than other algorithms. In the second stage, various image preprocessing techniques, consisting of two filters, namely, Median and Wiener, and five image segmentation methods, namely, Sobel, Prewitt, Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) edge detector, basic global thresholding, and Otsu’s global thresholding, are compared to determine the centroids of circular objects using Späth algorithm. It is found that Wiener filter plus LoG edge detector performs better than other preprocessing techniques. Real images of a calibration target (typical in flow diagnostics) and the secondary atomization of water droplets are then considered for centroids detection. These two images are preprocessed using Wiener filter plus LoG edge detector and then processed using Späth algorithm to detect the centroids of circular objects. It is observed that the results of real image of the calibration target and synthetic images are comparable. Also, based on visual inspection, the centroids detected in the real image of water droplets are found to be reasonably accurate.

     

FOCUS: A system for searching for multi-colored objects in a diverse image database

We describe a new multi-phase, color-based image retrieval system (FOCUS) which is capable of identifying multi-colored query objects in an image in the presence of significant, interfering backgrounds. The query object may occur in arbitrary sizes, orientations, and locations in the database images. Scale and rotation invariant color features have been developed to describe an image, such that the matching process is fast even in the case of complex images. The first phase of processing matches the query object color with the color content of an image computed as the peaks in the color histogram of the image. The second phase matches the spatial relationships between color regions in the image with the query using a spatial proximity graph (SPG) structure designed for the purpose. Processing at coarse granularity is preferred over pixel-level processing to produce simpler graphs, which significantly reduces computation time during matching. The speed of the system and the small storage overhead make it suitable for use in large databases with online user interfaces. Test results with multi-colored query objects from man-made and natural domains show that FOCUS is quite effective in handling interfering backgrounds and large variations in scale. The experimental results on a database of diverse images highlights the capabilities of the system.     

基于颜色校正和去模糊的水下图像增强方法

由于光在水下传播时会出现吸收和散射的情况,水下图像往往存在色偏、对比度低、模糊、光照不均匀等问题。根据水下图像成像模型,人们在海底拍摄所获得的图像往往是退化的图像,而退化的图像不能完整地表达海洋场景信息,难以满足实际的应用需要。为此,文中提出了一种基于颜色校正和去模糊的水下图像增强方法。该方法有效融合了颜色校正和去模糊两个阶段,取得了递增的增强效果。在颜色校正阶段,首先对原始图像进行对比度拉伸,在对比度拉伸完成之后,图像可能存在拉伸过度或拉伸不足的现象。因此,所提方法根据灰度世界先验,在对比度拉伸后进一步使用伽马校正来优化和调整图像的对比度和色彩,使图像的R,G,B三通道的灰度值之和趋于相等。接着,在去模糊阶段,通过融合暗通道先验对颜色校正后的图像进行去模糊,得到最终的增强图像。实验结果表明,所提方法具有良好的整体恢复效果,能有效地恢复图像信息,在主观评价和客观评价上均展现出较好的效果。另外,所提方法可以作为水下图像分类等计算机视觉任务的预处理步骤,在实验中能够将水下图像集的分类精度提升16%左右。     

基于最佳邻域重构指数的水下高光谱目标检测

水下机器人仅通过传统光学相机获取图像很难在复杂水下环境中或目标物具有保护色的情况下检测到目标,而通过高光谱技术进行水下目标检测可以改善这一情况;由于直接运用传统高光谱检测方法难以满足水下机器人对水下目标检测的要求,提出了一种基于最佳邻域重构指数(ONRIF)的高光谱目标检测方法,该方法通过线性重构的思想进行邻域寻优,选出信息量高且波段相关性低的波段组合,并使用所选波段的融合图像进行目标检测;结果表明,与直接对原始水下海产品高光谱图像进行检测相比,该方法在保证检测效果的前提下,大量减少了检测时间和数据冗余程度;还提出了一种在相同环境下对同类目标物的单波段快速采集检测方法,大大提高了采集数据的速度,可以满足水下机器人对海产品检测的需求.     

Visual learning and recognition of 3-d objects from appearance

The problem of automatically learning object models for recognition and pose estimation is addressed. In contrast to the traditional approach, the recognition problem is formulated as one of matching appearance rather than shape. The appearance of an object in a two-dimensional image depends on its shape, reflectance properties, pose in the scene, and the illumination conditions. While shape and reflectance are intrinsic properties and constant for a rigid object, pose and illumination vary from scene to scene. A compact representation of object appearance is proposed that is parametrized by pose and illumination. For each object of interest, a large set of images is obtained by automatically varying pose and illumination. This image set is compressed to obtain a low-dimensional subspace, called the eigenspace, in which the object is represented as a manifold. Given an unknown input image, the recognition system projects the image to eigenspace. The object is recognized based on the manifold it lies on. The exact position of the projection on the manifold determines the object's pose in the image.A variety of experiments are conducted using objects with complex appearance characteristics. The performance of the recognition and pose estimation algorithms is studied using over a thousand input images of sample objects. Sensitivity of recognition to the number of eigenspace dimensions and the number of learning samples is analyzed. For the objects used, appearance representation in eigenspaces with less than 20 dimensions produces accurate recognition results with an average pose estimation error of about 1.0 degree. A near real-time recognition system with 20 complex objects in the database has been developed. The paper is concluded with a discussion on various issues related to the proposed learning and recognition methodology.     

水下成像声呐探测系统建模与仿真

水下探测技术已成为几年来各国普遍重视发展的技术之一。为解决通过试验进行水下声呐成像探测研究的方法中存在的经济成本高、技术方法准确性不好把握等问题。该文采用数学建模和计算机软件仿真的方法,在进行水下成像声呐探测仿真系统的总体软件设计的基础上,对各子模块的算法的研究现状进行分析,重点分析了声呐图像生成、图像滤波、目标识别以及控制系统等单元,并给出了部分算法的数学模型和仿真结果。从而实现了水下成像声呐探测系统的模拟,为水下声呐成像探测技术的研究提供了一个经济实用、高准确度的研究平台。