Generative Adversarial Networks for Visible to Infrared Video Conversion

Deep learning models are data driven. For example, the most popular convolutional neural network (CNN) model used for image classification or object detection requires large labeled databases for training to achieve competitive performances. This requirement is not difficult to be satisfied in the visible domain since there are lots of labeled video and image databases available nowadays. However, given the less popularity of infrared (IR) camera, the availability of labeled infrared videos or image databases is limited. Therefore, training deep learning models in infrared domain is still challenging. In this chapter, we applied the pix2pix generative adversarial network (Pix2Pix GAN) and cycle-consistent GAN (Cycle GAN) models to convert visible videos to infrared videos. The Pix2Pix GAN model requires visible-infrared image pairs for training while the Cycle GAN relaxes this constraint and requires only unpaired images from both domains. We applied the two models to an open-source database where visible and infrared videos provided by the signal multimedia and telecommunications laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. We evaluated conversion results by performance metrics including Inception Score (IS), Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and Kernel Inception Distance (KID). Our experiments suggest that cycle-consistent GAN is more effective than pix2pix GAN for generating IR images from optical images

Bounded PCA based Multi Sensor Image Fusion Employing Curvelet Transform Coefficients

The fusion of thermal and visible images acts as an important device for target detection. The quality of the spectral content of the fused image improves with wavelet-based image fusion. However, compared to PCA-based fusion, most wavelet-based methods provide results with a lower spatial resolution. The outcome gets better when the two approaches are combined, but they may still be refined. Compared to wavelets, the curvelet transforms more accurately depict the edges in the image. Enhancing the edges is a smart way to improve spatial resolution and the edges are crucial for interpreting the images. The fusion technique that utilizes curvelets enables the provision of additional data in both spectral and spatial areas concurrently. In this paper, we employ an amalgamation of Curvelet Transform and a Bounded PCA (CTBPCA) method to fuse thermal and visible images. To evidence the enhanced efficiency of our proposed technique, multiple evaluation metrics and comparisons with existing image merging methods are employed. Our approach outperforms others in both qualitative and quantitative analysis, except for runtime performance. Future Enhancement-The study will be based on using the fused image for target recognition. Future work should also focus on this method’s continued improvement and optimization for real-time video processing

Recent Advances in Image Restoration with Applications to Real World Problems

In the past few decades, imaging hardware has improved tremendously in terms of resolution, making widespread usage of images in many diverse applications on Earth and planetary missions. However, practical issues associated with image acquisition are still affecting image quality. Some of these issues such as blurring, measurement noise, mosaicing artifacts, low spatial or spectral resolution, etc. can seriously affect the accuracy of the aforementioned applications. This book intends to provide the reader with a glimpse of the latest developments and recent advances in image restoration, which includes image super-resolution, image fusion to enhance spatial, spectral resolution, and temporal resolutions, and the generation of synthetic images using deep learning techniques. Some practical applications are also included