Visibility recovery on images acquired in attenuating media. Application to underwater, fog, and mammographic imaging

136 p.When acquired in attenuating media, digital images of ten suffer from a particularly complex degradation that reduces their visual quality, hindering their suitability for further computational applications, or simply decreasing the visual pleasan tness for the user. In these cases, mathematical image processing reveals it self as an ideal tool to recover some of the information lost during the degradation process. In this dissertation,we deal with three of such practical scenarios in which this problematic is specially relevant, namely, underwater image enhancement, fogremoval and mammographic image processing. In the case of digital mammograms,X-ray beams traverse human tissue, and electronic detectorscapture them as they reach the other side. However, the superposition on a bidimensional image of three-dimensional structures produces low contraste dimages in which structures of interest suffer from a diminished visibility, obstructing diagnosis tasks. Regarding fog removal, the loss of contrast is produced by the atmospheric conditions, and white colour takes over the scene uniformly as distance increases, also reducing visibility.For underwater images, there is an added difficulty, since colour is not lost uniformly; instead, red colours decay the fastest, and green and blue colours typically dominate the acquired images. To address all these challenges,in this dissertation we develop new methodologies that rely on: a)physical models of the observed degradation, and b) the calculus of variations.Equipped with this powerful machinery, we design novel theoreticaland computational tools, including image-dependent functional energies that capture the particularities of each degradation model. These energie sare composed of different integral terms that are simultaneous lyminimized by means of efficient numerical schemes, producing a clean,visually-pleasant and use ful output image, with better contrast and increased visibility. In every considered application, we provide comprehensive qualitative (visual) and quantitative experimental results to validateour methods, confirming that the developed techniques out perform other existing approaches in the literature

Endoscopic Vision Augmentation Using Multiscale Bilateral-Weighted Retinex for Robotic Surgery

医疗机器人手术视觉是微创外科手术成功与否的关键所在。由于手术器械医学电子内镜自身内在的局限性，导致了手术视野不清晰、光照不均、多烟雾等诸多问题，使得外科医生无法准确快速感知与识别人体内部器官中的神经血管以及病灶位置等结构信息，这无疑增加了手术风险和手术时间。针对这些手术视觉问题，本论文提出了一种基于双边滤波权重分析的多尺度Retinex模型方法，对达芬奇医疗机器人手术过程中所采集到的病患视频进行处理与分析。经过外科医生对实验结果的主观评价，一致认为该方法能够大幅度地增强手术视野质量；同时客观评价实验结果表明本论文所提出方法优于目前计算机视觉领域内的图像增强与恢复方法。 厦门大学信息科学与技术学院计算机科学系罗雄彪教授为本文第一作者。【Abstract】Endoscopic vision plays a significant role in minimally invasive surgical procedures. The visibility and maintenance of such direct in-situ vision is paramount not only for safety by preventing inadvertent injury, but also to improve precision and reduce operating time. Unfortunately, endoscopic vision is unavoidably degraded due to illumination variations during surgery. This work aims to restore or augment such degraded visualization and quantitatively evaluate it during robotic surgery. A multiscale bilateral-weighted retinex method is proposed to remove non-uniform and highly directional illumination and enhance surgical vision, while an objective noreference image visibility assessment method is defined in terms of sharpness, naturalness, and contrast, to quantitatively and objectively evaluate endoscopic visualization on surgical video sequences. The methods were validated on surgical data, with the experimental results showing that our method outperforms existent retinex approaches. In particular, the combined visibility was improved from 0.81 to 1.06, while three surgeons generally agreed that the results were restored with much better visibility.The authors thank the assistance of Dr. Stephen Pautler for facilitating the data acquisition, Dr. A. Jonathan McLeod and Dr.Uditha Jayarathne for helpful discussions

Mathematical Approaches for Image Enhancement Problems

This thesis develops novel techniques that can solve some image enhancement problems using theoretically and technically proven and very useful mathematical tools to image processing such as wavelet transforms, partial differential equations, and variational models. Three subtopics are mainly covered. First, color image denoising framework is introduced to achieve high quality denoising results by considering correlations between color components while existing denoising approaches can be plugged in flexibly. Second, a new and efficient framework for image contrast and color enhancement in the compressed wavelet domain is proposed. The proposed approach is capable of enhancing both global and local contrast and brightness as well as preserving color consistency. The framework does not require inverse transform for image enhancement since linear scale factors are directly applied to both scaling and wavelet coefficients in the compressed domain, which results in high computational efficiency. Also contaminated noise in the image can be efficiently reduced by introducing wavelet shrinkage terms adaptively in different scales. The proposed method is able to enhance a wavelet-coded image computationally efficiently with high image quality and less noise or other artifact. The experimental results show that the proposed method produces encouraging results both visually and numerically compared to some existing approaches. Finally, image inpainting problem is discussed. Literature review, psychological analysis, and challenges on image inpainting problem and related topics are described. An inpainting algorithm using energy minimization and texture mapping is proposed. Mumford-Shah energy minimization model detects and preserves edges in the inpainting domain by detecting both the main structure and the detailed edges. This approach utilizes faster hierarchical level set method and guarantees convergence independent of initial conditions. The estimated segmentation results in the inpainting domain are stored in segmentation map, which is referred by a texture mapping algorithm for filling textured regions. We also propose an inpainting algorithm using wavelet transform that can expect better global structure estimation of the unknown region in addition to shape and texture properties since wavelet transforms have been used for various image analysis problems due to its nice multi-resolution properties and decoupling characteristics

Low-Light Image Enhancement Based on U-Net and Haar Wavelet Pooling

The inevitable environmental and technical limitations of image capturing has as a consequence that many images are frequently taken in inadequate and unbalanced lighting conditions. Low-light image enhancement has been very popular for improving the visual quality of image representations, while low-light images often require advanced techniques to improve the perception of information for a human viewer. One of the main objectives in increasing the lighting conditions is to retain patterns, texture, and style with minimal deviations from the considered image. To this direction, we propose a low-light image enhancement method with Haar wavelet-based pooling to preserve texture regions and increase their quality. The presented framework is based on the U-Net architecture to retain spatial information, with a multi-layer feature aggregation (MFA) method. The method obtains the details from the low-level layers in the stylization processing. The encoder is based on dense blocks, while the decoder is the reverse of the encoder, and extracts features that reconstruct the image. Experimental results show that the combination of the U-Net architecture with dense blocks and the wavelet-based pooling mechanism comprises an efficient approach in low-light image enhancement applications. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework reaches state-of-the-art accuracy but with less resources than LeGAN

Low-Light Enhancement in the Frequency Domain

Decreased visibility, intensive noise, and biased color are the common problems existing in low-light images. These visual disturbances further reduce the performance of high-level vision tasks, such as object detection, and tracking. To address this issue, some image enhancement methods have been proposed to increase the image contrast. However, most of them are implemented only in the spatial domain, which can be severely influenced by noise signals while enhancing. Hence, in this work, we propose a novel residual recurrent multi-wavelet convolutional neural network R2-MWCNN learned in the frequency domain that can simultaneously increase the image contrast and reduce noise signals well. This end-to-end trainable network utilizes a multi-level discrete wavelet transform to divide input feature maps into distinct frequencies, resulting in a better denoise impact. A channel-wise loss function is proposed to correct the color distortion for more realistic results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed R2-MWCNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods quantitively and qualitatively.Comment: 8 page

Low-Light Image Enhancement with Wavelet-based Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have achieved promising results in image restoration tasks, yet suffer from time-consuming, excessive computational resource consumption, and unstable restoration. To address these issues, we propose a robust and efficient Diffusion-based Low-Light image enhancement approach, dubbed DiffLL. Specifically, we present a wavelet-based conditional diffusion model (WCDM) that leverages the generative power of diffusion models to produce results with satisfactory perceptual fidelity. Additionally, it also takes advantage of the strengths of wavelet transformation to greatly accelerate inference and reduce computational resource usage without sacrificing information. To avoid chaotic content and diversity, we perform both forward diffusion and reverse denoising in the training phase of WCDM, enabling the model to achieve stable denoising and reduce randomness during inference. Moreover, we further design a high-frequency restoration module (HFRM) that utilizes the vertical and horizontal details of the image to complement the diagonal information for better fine-grained restoration. Extensive experiments on publicly available real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and visually, and it achieves remarkable improvements in efficiency compared to previous diffusion-based methods. In addition, we empirically show that the application for low-light face detection also reveals the latent practical values of our method

Variational models for color image processing in the RGB space inspired by human vision Mémoire d'Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches dans la spécialité Mathématiques

La recherche que j'ai développée jusqu'à maintenant peut être divisée en quatre catégories principales : les modèles variationnels pourla correction de la couleur basée sur la perception humaine, le transfert d'histogrammes, le traitement d'images à haute gammedynamique et les statistiques d'images naturelles en couleur. Les sujets ci-dessus sont très inter-connectés car la couleur est un sujetfortement inter-disciplinaire

Recent Progress in Image Deblurring

This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image deblurring, including non-blind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, image deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods, homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also presented.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figure