Graph Spectral Image Processing

Recent advent of graph signal processing (GSP) has spurred intensive studies of signals that live naturally on irregular data kernels described by graphs (e.g., social networks, wireless sensor networks). Though a digital image contains pixels that reside on a regularly sampled 2D grid, if one can design an appropriate underlying graph connecting pixels with weights that reflect the image structure, then one can interpret the image (or image patch) as a signal on a graph, and apply GSP tools for processing and analysis of the signal in graph spectral domain. In this article, we overview recent graph spectral techniques in GSP specifically for image / video processing. The topics covered include image compression, image restoration, image filtering and image segmentation

Manifold Graph Signal Restoration using Gradient Graph Laplacian Regularizer

In the graph signal processing (GSP) literature, graph Laplacian regularizer (GLR) was used for signal restoration to promote piecewise smooth / constant reconstruction with respect to an underlying graph. However, for signals slowly varying across graph kernels, GLR suffers from an undesirable "staircase" effect. In this paper, focusing on manifold graphs -- collections of uniform discrete samples on low-dimensional continuous manifolds -- we generalize GLR to gradient graph Laplacian regularizer (GGLR) that promotes planar / piecewise planar (PWP) signal reconstruction. Specifically, for a graph endowed with sampling coordinates (e.g., 2D images, 3D point clouds), we first define a gradient operator, using which we construct a gradient graph for nodes' gradients in sampling manifold space. This maps to a gradient-induced nodal graph (GNG) and a positive semi-definite (PSD) Laplacian matrix with planar signals as the 0 frequencies. For manifold graphs without explicit sampling coordinates, we propose a graph embedding method to obtain node coordinates via fast eigenvector computation. We derive the means-square-error minimizing weight parameter for GGLR efficiently, trading off bias and variance of the signal estimate. Experimental results show that GGLR outperformed previous graph signal priors like GLR and graph total variation (GTV) in a range of graph signal restoration tasks

Graph Signal Restoration Using Nested Deep Algorithm Unrolling

Graph signal processing is a ubiquitous task in many applications such as sensor, social, transportation and brain networks, point cloud processing, and graph neural networks. Graph signals are often corrupted through sensing processes, and need to be restored for the above applications. In this paper, we propose two graph signal restoration methods based on deep algorithm unrolling (DAU). First, we present a graph signal denoiser by unrolling iterations of the alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM). We then propose a general restoration method for linear degradation by unrolling iterations of Plug-and-Play ADMM (PnP-ADMM). In the second method, the unrolled ADMM-based denoiser is incorporated as a submodule. Therefore, our restoration method has a nested DAU structure. Thanks to DAU, parameters in the proposed denoising/restoration methods are trainable in an end-to-end manner. Since the proposed restoration methods are based on iterations of a (convex) optimization algorithm, the method is interpretable and keeps the number of parameters small because we only need to tune graph-independent regularization parameters. We solve two main problems in existing graph signal restoration methods: 1) limited performance of convex optimization algorithms due to fixed parameters which are often determined manually. 2) large number of parameters of graph neural networks that result in difficulty of training. Several experiments for graph signal denoising and interpolation are performed on synthetic and real-world data. The proposed methods show performance improvements to several existing methods in terms of root mean squared error in both tasks

Point Cloud Denoising using Joint Geometry/Color Graph Wavelets

A point cloud is a 3D geometric signal representation associated with other attributes such as color, normal, trans parency. Point clouds usually suffer from noise due to imperfect acquisition systems. Based on the notion that geometry and color are correlated, we present a novel non-iterative framework for point cloud denoising using Spectral Graph Wavelet transform (SGW) that takes advantage of this correlation and performs denoising in the graph frequency domain. The proposed approach is based on the design of a joint geometry and color graph that compacts the energy of smooth graph signals in low-frequency bands. We then apply soft-thresholding to remove the noise from the spectral graph wavelet coefficients. Experimental results show that the proposed technique significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods

Joint geometry and color point cloud denoising based on graph wavelets

A point cloud is an effective 3D geometrical presentation of data paired with different attributes such as transparency, normal and color of each point. The imperfect acquisition process of a 3D point cloud usually generates a significant amount of noise. Hence, point cloud denoising has received a lot of attention. Most of the existing techniques perform point cloud denoising based only on the geometry information of the neighbouring points; there are very few works considering the problem of denoising of color attributes of a point cloud, and taking advantage of the correlation between geometry and color. In this article, we introduce a novel non-iterative set-up for the denoising of point cloud based on spectral graph wavelet transform (SGW) that jointly exploits geometry and color to perform denoising of geometry and color attributes in graph spectral domain. The designed framework is based on the construction of joint geometry and color graph that compacts the energy of smooth graph signals in the low-frequency bands. The noise is then removed from the spectral graph wavelet coefficients by applying data-driven adaptive soft-thresholding. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed denoising technique significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods using both subjective and objective quality metrics

Interpretable Hyperspectral AI: When Non-Convex Modeling meets Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Hyperspectral imaging, also known as image spectrometry, is a landmark technique in geoscience and remote sensing (RS). In the past decade, enormous efforts have been made to process and analyze these hyperspectral (HS) products mainly by means of seasoned experts. However, with the ever-growing volume of data, the bulk of costs in manpower and material resources poses new challenges on reducing the burden of manual labor and improving efficiency. For this reason, it is, therefore, urgent to develop more intelligent and automatic approaches for various HS RS applications. Machine learning (ML) tools with convex optimization have successfully undertaken the tasks of numerous artificial intelligence (AI)-related applications. However, their ability in handling complex practical problems remains limited, particularly for HS data, due to the effects of various spectral variabilities in the process of HS imaging and the complexity and redundancy of higher dimensional HS signals. Compared to the convex models, non-convex modeling, which is capable of characterizing more complex real scenes and providing the model interpretability technically and theoretically, has been proven to be a feasible solution to reduce the gap between challenging HS vision tasks and currently advanced intelligent data processing models

Approches tomographiques structurelles pour l'analyse du milieu urbain par tomographie SAR THR : TomoSAR

SAR tomography consists in exploiting multiple images from the same area acquired from a slightly different angle to retrieve the 3-D distribution of the complex reflectivity on the ground. As the transmitted waves are coherent, the desired spatial information (along with the vertical axis) is coded in the phase of the pixels. Many methods have been proposed to retrieve this information in the past years. However, the natural redundancies of the scene are generally not exploited to improve the tomographic estimation step. This Ph.D. presents new approaches to regularize the estimated reflectivity density obtained through SAR tomography by exploiting the urban geometrical structures.La tomographie SAR exploite plusieurs acquisitions d'une même zone acquises d'un point de vue légerement différent pour reconstruire la densité complexe de réflectivité au sol. Cette technique d'imagerie s'appuyant sur l'émission et la réception d'ondes électromagnétiques cohérentes, les données analysées sont complexes et l'information spatiale manquante (selon la verticale) est codée dans la phase. De nombreuse méthodes ont pu être proposées pour retrouver cette information. L'utilisation des redondances naturelles à certains milieux n'est toutefois généralement pas exploitée pour améliorer l'estimation tomographique. Cette thèse propose d'utiliser l'information structurelle propre aux structures urbaines pour régulariser les densités de réflecteurs obtenues par cette technique