From quantum-codemaking to quantum code-breaking

This is a semi-popular overview of quantum entanglement as an important physical resource in the field of data security and quantum computing. After a brief outline of entanglement's key role in philosophical debates about the meaning of quantum mechanics I describe its current impact on both cryptography and cryptanalysis. The paper is based on the lecture given at the conference "Geometric Issues in the Foundations of Science" (Oxford, June 1996) in honor of Roger Penrose.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX2e, psfig, multi3.cls, 1 eps figur

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

The Acceleration of Polynomial Methods for Blind Image Deconvolution Using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs)

Image processing has become an integral part of many areas of study. Unfortunately, the process of capturing images can often result in undesirable blurring and noise, and thus can make processing the resulting images problematic. Methods are therefore required that attempt to remove blurring. The main body of work in this field is in Bayesian methods for image deblurring, with many algorithms aimed at solving this problem relying on the Fourier transform. The Fourier transform results in the amplification of noise in the image, which can lead to many of the same problems as blurring. Winkler presented a method of blind image deconvolution (BID) without the Fourier transform, which treated the rows and columns of the blurred image as the coefficients of univariate polynomials. By treating the rows and columns of the image in this way, the problem of computing the blurring function becomes a problem of computing the greatest common divisor (GCD) of these polynomials. The computation of the GCD of two polynomials is ill posed, as any noise in the polynomials causes them to be coprime. Thus an approximate GCD (AGCD) must be computed instead. The computation of an AGCD is a computationally expensive process, resulting in the BID algorithm being expensive. The research presented in this thesis investigates the fundamental mathematical processes underpinning such an algorithm, and presents multiple methods through which this algorithm can be accelerated using a GPU. This acceleration results in an implementation that is 30 times faster than a CPU parallel approach. The process of accelerating the BID algorithm in this way required a first of its kind GPU accelerated algorithm for the computation of an AGCD, with multiple novel techniques utilised to achieve this acceleration

The Sylvester and Bézout resultant matrices for blind image deconvolution

Blind image deconvolution (BID) is one of the most important problems in image processing and it requires the determination of an exact image F from a degraded form of it G when little or no information about F and the point spread function (PSF) H is known. Several methods have been developed for the solution of this problem, and one class of methods considers F; G and H to be bivariate polynomials in which the polynomial computations are implemented by the Sylvester or B ezout resultant matrices. This paper compares these matrices for the solution of the problem of BID, and it is shown that it reduces to a comparison of their e ectiveness for greatest common divisor (GCD) computations. This is a di cult problem because the determination of the degree of the GCD of two polynomials requires the calculation of the rank of a matrix, and this rank determines the size of the PSF. It is shown that although the B ezout matrix is symmetric (unlike the Sylvester matrix) and it is smaller than the Sylvester matrix, which have computational advantages, it yields consistently worse results than the Sylvester matrix for the size and coe cients of the PSF. Computational examples of blurred and deblurred images obtained with the Sylvester and B ezout matrices are shown and the superior results obtained with the Sylvester matrix are evident

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

Structured Sub-Nyquist Sampling with Applications in Compressive Toeplitz Covariance Estimation, Super-Resolution and Phase Retrieval

Sub-Nyquist sampling has received a huge amount of interest in the past decade. In classical compressed sensing theory, if the measurement procedure satisfies a particular condition known as Restricted Isometry Property (RIP), we can achieve stable recovery of signals of low-dimensional intrinsic structures with an order-wise optimal sample size. Such low-dimensional structures include sparse and low rank for both vector and matrix cases. The main drawback of conventional compressed sensing theory is that random measurements are required to ensure the RIP property. However, in many applications such as imaging and array signal processing, applying independent random measurements may not be practical as the systems are deterministic. Moreover, random measurements based compressed sensing always exploits convex programs for signal recovery even in the noiseless case, and solving those programs is computationally intensive if the ambient dimension is large, especially in the matrix case. The main contribution of this dissertation is that we propose a deterministic sub-Nyquist sampling framework for compressing the structured signal and come up with computationally efficient algorithms. Besides widely studied sparse and low-rank structures, we particularly focus on the cases that the signals of interest are stationary or the measurements are of Fourier type. The key difference between our work from classical compressed sensing theory is that we explicitly exploit the second-order statistics of the signals, and study the equivalent quadratic measurement model in the correlation domain. The essential observation made in this dissertation is that a difference/sum coarray structure will arise from the quadratic model if the measurements are of Fourier type. With these observations, we are able to achieve a better compression rate for covariance estimation, identify more sources in array signal processing or recover the signals of larger sparsity. In this dissertation, we will first study the problem of Toeplitz covariance estimation. In particular, we will show how to achieve an order-wise optimal compression rate using the idea of sparse arrays in both general and low-rank cases. Then, an analysis framework of super-resolution with positivity constraint is established. We will present fundamental robustness guarantees, efficient algorithms and applications in practices. Next, we will study the problem of phase-retrieval for which we successfully apply the sparse array ideas by fully exploiting the quadratic measurement model. We achieve near-optimal sample complexity for both sparse and general cases with practical Fourier measurements and provide efficient and deterministic recovery algorithms. In the end, we will further elaborate on the essential role of non-negative constraint in underdetermined inverse problems. In particular, we will analyze the nonlinear co-array interpolation problem and develop a universal upper bound of the interpolation error. Bilinear problem with non-negative constraint will be considered next and the exact characterization of the ambiguous solutions will be established for the first time in literature. At last, we will show how to apply the nested array idea to solve real problems such as Kriging. Using spatial correlation information, we are able to have a stable estimate of the field of interest with fewer sensors than classic methodologies. Extensive numerical experiments are implemented to demonstrate our theoretical claims