Design of Novel Algorithm and Architecture for Gaussian Based Color Image Enhancement System for Real Time Applications

This paper presents the development of a new algorithm for Gaussian based color image enhancement system. The algorithm has been designed into architecture suitable for FPGA/ASIC implementation. The color image enhancement is achieved by first convolving an original image with a Gaussian kernel since Gaussian distribution is a point spread function which smoothen the image. Further, logarithm-domain processing and gain/offset corrections are employed in order to enhance and translate pixels into the display range of 0 to 255. The proposed algorithm not only provides better dynamic range compression and color rendition effect but also achieves color constancy in an image. The design exploits high degrees of pipelining and parallel processing to achieve real time performance. The design has been realized by RTL compliant Verilog coding and fits into a single FPGA with a gate count utilization of 321,804. The proposed method is implemented using Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP40-7FF1148 FPGA device and is capable of processing high resolution color motion pictures of sizes of up to 1600x1200 pixels at the real time video rate of 116 frames per second. This shows that the proposed design would work for not only still images but also for high resolution video sequences.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figure

Variational Disparity Estimation Framework for Plenoptic Image

This paper presents a computational framework for accurately estimating the disparity map of plenoptic images. The proposed framework is based on the variational principle and provides intrinsic sub-pixel precision. The light-field motion tensor introduced in the framework allows us to combine advanced robust data terms as well as provides explicit treatments for different color channels. A warping strategy is embedded in our framework for tackling the large displacement problem. We also show that by applying a simple regularization term and a guided median filtering, the accuracy of displacement field at occluded area could be greatly enhanced. We demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed framework by intensive comparisons with the Lytro software and contemporary approaches on both synthetic and real-world datasets

A massively parallel multi-level approach to a domain decomposition method for the optical flow estimation with varying illumination

We consider a variational method to solve the optical flow problem with varying illumination. We apply an adaptive control of the regularization parameter which allows us to preserve the edges and fine features of the computed flow. To reduce the complexity of the estimation for high resolution images and the time of computations, we implement a multi-level parallel approach based on the domain decomposition with the Schwarz overlapping method. The second level of parallelism uses the massively parallel solver MUMPS. We perform some numerical simulations to show the efficiency of our approach and to validate it on classical and real-world image sequences

Fully Point-wise Convolutional Neural Network for Modeling Statistical Regularities in Natural Images

Modeling statistical regularity plays an essential role in ill-posed image processing problems. Recently, deep learning based methods have been presented to implicitly learn statistical representation of pixel distributions in natural images and leverage it as a constraint to facilitate subsequent tasks, such as color constancy and image dehazing. However, the existing CNN architecture is prone to variability and diversity of pixel intensity within and between local regions, which may result in inaccurate statistical representation. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel fully point-wise CNN architecture for modeling statistical regularities in natural images. Specifically, we propose to randomly shuffle the pixels in the origin images and leverage the shuffled image as input to make CNN more concerned with the statistical properties. Moreover, since the pixels in the shuffled image are independent identically distributed, we can replace all the large convolution kernels in CNN with point-wise ($1*1$) convolution kernels while maintaining the representation ability. Experimental results on two applications: color constancy and image dehazing, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed network over the existing architectures, i.e., using 1/10$\sim$1/100 network parameters and computational cost while achieving comparable performance.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. To appear in ACM MM 201

Children, Humanoid Robots and Caregivers

This paper presents developmental learning on a humanoid robot from human-robot interactions. We consider in particular teaching humanoids as children during the child's Separation and Individuation developmental phase (Mahler, 1979). Cognitive development during this phase is characterized both by the child's dependence on her mother for learning while becoming awareness of her own individuality, and by self-exploration of her physical surroundings. We propose a learning framework for a humanoid robot inspired on such cognitive development