Strong edge features for image coding

A two-component model is proposed for perceptual image coding. For the first component of the model, the watershed operator is used to detect strong edge features. Then, an efficient morphological interpolation algorithm reconstructs the smooth areas of the image from the extracted edge information, also known as sketch data. The residual component, containing fine textures, is separately coded by a subband coding scheme. The morphological operators involved in the coding of the primary component perform very efficiently compared to conventional techniques like the LGO operator, used for the edge extraction, or the diffusion filters, iteratively applied for the interpolation of smooth areas in previously reported sketch-based coding schemes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Video Interpolation using Optical Flow and Laplacian Smoothness

Non-rigid video interpolation is a common computer vision task. In this paper we present an optical flow approach which adopts a Laplacian Cotangent Mesh constraint to enhance the local smoothness. Similar to Li et al., our approach adopts a mesh to the image with a resolution up to one vertex per pixel and uses angle constraints to ensure sensible local deformations between image pairs. The Laplacian Mesh constraints are expressed wholly inside the optical flow optimization, and can be applied in a straightforward manner to a wide range of image tracking and registration problems. We evaluate our approach by testing on several benchmark datasets, including the Middlebury and Garg et al. datasets. In addition, we show application of our method for constructing 3D Morphable Facial Models from dynamic 3D data

A Multiscale Pyramid Transform for Graph Signals

Multiscale transforms designed to process analog and discrete-time signals and images cannot be directly applied to analyze high-dimensional data residing on the vertices of a weighted graph, as they do not capture the intrinsic geometric structure of the underlying graph data domain. In this paper, we adapt the Laplacian pyramid transform for signals on Euclidean domains so that it can be used to analyze high-dimensional data residing on the vertices of a weighted graph. Our approach is to study existing methods and develop new methods for the four fundamental operations of graph downsampling, graph reduction, and filtering and interpolation of signals on graphs. Equipped with appropriate notions of these operations, we leverage the basic multiscale constructs and intuitions from classical signal processing to generate a transform that yields both a multiresolution of graphs and an associated multiresolution of a graph signal on the underlying sequence of graphs.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figure

Optimising Spatial and Tonal Data for PDE-based Inpainting

Some recent methods for lossy signal and image compression store only a few selected pixels and fill in the missing structures by inpainting with a partial differential equation (PDE). Suitable operators include the Laplacian, the biharmonic operator, and edge-enhancing anisotropic diffusion (EED). The quality of such approaches depends substantially on the selection of the data that is kept. Optimising this data in the domain and codomain gives rise to challenging mathematical problems that shall be addressed in our work. In the 1D case, we prove results that provide insights into the difficulty of this problem, and we give evidence that a splitting into spatial and tonal (i.e. function value) optimisation does hardly deteriorate the results. In the 2D setting, we present generic algorithms that achieve a high reconstruction quality even if the specified data is very sparse. To optimise the spatial data, we use a probabilistic sparsification, followed by a nonlocal pixel exchange that avoids getting trapped in bad local optima. After this spatial optimisation we perform a tonal optimisation that modifies the function values in order to reduce the global reconstruction error. For homogeneous diffusion inpainting, this comes down to a least squares problem for which we prove that it has a unique solution. We demonstrate that it can be found efficiently with a gradient descent approach that is accelerated with fast explicit diffusion (FED) cycles. Our framework allows to specify the desired density of the inpainting mask a priori. Moreover, is more generic than other data optimisation approaches for the sparse inpainting problem, since it can also be extended to nonlinear inpainting operators such as EED. This is exploited to achieve reconstructions with state-of-the-art quality. We also give an extensive literature survey on PDE-based image compression methods