Optimum non linear binary image restoration through linear grey-scale operations

Non-linear image processing operators give excellent results in a number of image processing tasks such as restoration and object recognition. However they are frequently excluded from use in solutions because the system designer does not wish to introduce additional hardware or algorithms and because their design can appear to be ad hoc. In practice the median filter is often used though it is rarely optimal. This paper explains how various non-linear image processing operators may be implemented on a basic linear image processing system using only convolution and thresholding operations. The paper is aimed at image processing system developers wishing to include some non-linear processing operators without introducing additional system capabilities such as extra hardware components or software toolboxes. It may also be of benefit to the interested reader wishing to learn more about non-linear operators and alternative methods of design and implementation. The non-linear tools include various components of mathematical morphology, median and weighted median operators and various order statistic filters. As well as describing novel algorithms for implementation within a linear system the paper also explains how the optimum filter parameters may be estimated for a given image processing task. This novel approach is based on the weight monotonic property and is a direct rather than iterated method

Systematic approach to nonlinear filtering associated with aggregation operators. Part 1. SISO-filters

There are various methods to help restore an image from noisy distortions. Each technique has its advantages and disadvantages. Selecting the appropriate method plays a major role in getting the desired image. Noise removal or noise reduction can be done on an image by linear or nonlinear filtering. The more popular linear technique is based on average (on mean) linear operators. Denoising via linear filters normally does not perform satisfactorily since both noise and edges contain high frequencies. Therefore, any practical denoising model has to be nonlinear. In this work, we introduce and analyze a new class of nonlinear SISO-filters that have their roots in aggregation operator theory. We show that a large body of non-linear filters proposed to date constitute a proper subset of aggregation filters. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.This work was supported by grants the RFBR No. 17-07-00886 and by Ural State Forest Engineering's Center of Excellence in "Quantum and Classical Information Technologies for Remote Sensing Systems"

Systematic approach to nonlinear filtering associated with aggregation operators. Part 2. Frechet MIMO-filters

Median filtering has been widely used in scalar-valued image processing as an edge preserving operation. The basic idea is that the pixel value is replaced by the median of the pixels contained in a window around it. In this work, this idea is extended onto vector-valued images. It is based on the fact that the median is also the value that minimizes the sum of distances between all grey-level pixels in the window. The Frechet median of a discrete set of vector-valued pixels in a metric space with a metric is the point minimizing the sum of metric distances to the all sample pixels. In this paper, we extend the notion of the Frechet median to the general Frechet median, which minimizes the Frechet cost function (FCF) in the form of aggregation function of metric distances, instead of the ordinary sum. Moreover, we propose use an aggregation distance instead of classical metric distance. We use generalized Frechet median for constructing new nonlinear Frechet MIMO-filters for multispectral image processing. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.This work was supported by grants the RFBR No 17-07-00886, No 17-29-03369 and by Ural State Forest University Engineering's Center of Excellence in "Quantum and Classical Information Technologies for Remote Sensing Systems"

Learning the dynamics and time-recursive boundary detection of deformable objects

We propose a principled framework for recursively segmenting deformable objects across a sequence of frames. We demonstrate the usefulness of this method on left ventricular segmentation across a cardiac cycle. The approach involves a technique for learning the system dynamics together with methods of particle-based smoothing as well as non-parametric belief propagation on a loopy graphical model capturing the temporal periodicity of the heart. The dynamic system state is a low-dimensional representation of the boundary, and the boundary estimation involves incorporating curve evolution into recursive state estimation. By formulating the problem as one of state estimation, the segmentation at each particular time is based not only on the data observed at that instant, but also on predictions based on past and future boundary estimates. Although the paper focuses on left ventricle segmentation, the method generalizes to temporally segmenting any deformable object

Visual Representations: Defining Properties and Deep Approximations

Visual representations are defined in terms of minimal sufficient statistics of visual data, for a class of tasks, that are also invariant to nuisance variability. Minimal sufficiency guarantees that we can store a representation in lieu of raw data with smallest complexity and no performance loss on the task at hand. Invariance guarantees that the statistic is constant with respect to uninformative transformations of the data. We derive analytical expressions for such representations and show they are related to feature descriptors commonly used in computer vision, as well as to convolutional neural networks. This link highlights the assumptions and approximations tacitly assumed by these methods and explains empirical practices such as clamping, pooling and joint normalization.Comment: UCLA CSD TR140023, Nov. 12, 2014, revised April 13, 2015, November 13, 2015, February 28, 201