18,668 research outputs found
Adaptive Non-Local Means using Weight Thresholding
Non-local means (NLM) is a popular image denoising scheme for reducing additive Gaussian noise. It uses a patch-based approach to find similar regions within a search neighborhood and estimate the denoised pixel based on the weighted average of all the pixels in the neighborhood. All the pixels are considered for averaging, irrespective of the value of their weights. This thesis proposes an improved variant of the original NLM scheme, called Weight Thresholded Non-Local Means (WTNLM), by thresholding the weights of the pixels within the search neighborhood, where the thresholded weights are used in the averaging step. The key parameters of the WTNLM are defined using learning-based models. In addition, the proposed method is used as a two-step approach for image denoising. At the first step, WTNLM is applied to generate a basic estimate of the denoised image. The second step applies WTNLM once more but with different smoothing strength. Experiments show that the denoising performance of the proposed method is better than that of the original NLM scheme, and its variants. It also outperforms the state-of-the-art image denoising scheme, BM3D, but only at low noise levels (σ ≤ 80)
Sparsity and adaptivity for the blind separation of partially correlated sources
Blind source separation (BSS) is a very popular technique to analyze
multichannel data. In this context, the data are modeled as the linear
combination of sources to be retrieved. For that purpose, standard BSS methods
all rely on some discrimination principle, whether it is statistical
independence or morphological diversity, to distinguish between the sources.
However, dealing with real-world data reveals that such assumptions are rarely
valid in practice: the signals of interest are more likely partially
correlated, which generally hampers the performances of standard BSS methods.
In this article, we introduce a novel sparsity-enforcing BSS method coined
Adaptive Morphological Component Analysis (AMCA), which is designed to retrieve
sparse and partially correlated sources. More precisely, it makes profit of an
adaptive re-weighting scheme to favor/penalize samples based on their level of
correlation. Extensive numerical experiments have been carried out which show
that the proposed method is robust to the partial correlation of sources while
standard BSS techniques fail. The AMCA algorithm is evaluated in the field of
astrophysics for the separation of physical components from microwave data.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on signal processin
Approximate Lesion Localization in Dermoscopy Images
Background: Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the
diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty
and subjectivity of human interpretation, automated analysis of dermoscopy
images has become an important research area. Border detection is often the
first step in this analysis. Methods: In this article, we present an
approximate lesion localization method that serves as a preprocessing step for
detecting borders in dermoscopy images. In this method, first the black frame
around the image is removed using an iterative algorithm. The approximate
location of the lesion is then determined using an ensemble of thresholding
algorithms. Results: The method is tested on a set of 428 dermoscopy images.
The localization error is quantified by a metric that uses dermatologist
determined borders as the ground truth. Conclusion: The results demonstrate
that the method presented here achieves both fast and accurate localization of
lesions in dermoscopy images
Image Deblurring and Super-resolution by Adaptive Sparse Domain Selection and Adaptive Regularization
As a powerful statistical image modeling technique, sparse representation has
been successfully used in various image restoration applications. The success
of sparse representation owes to the development of l1-norm optimization
techniques, and the fact that natural images are intrinsically sparse in some
domain. The image restoration quality largely depends on whether the employed
sparse domain can represent well the underlying image. Considering that the
contents can vary significantly across different images or different patches in
a single image, we propose to learn various sets of bases from a pre-collected
dataset of example image patches, and then for a given patch to be processed,
one set of bases are adaptively selected to characterize the local sparse
domain. We further introduce two adaptive regularization terms into the sparse
representation framework. First, a set of autoregressive (AR) models are
learned from the dataset of example image patches. The best fitted AR models to
a given patch are adaptively selected to regularize the image local structures.
Second, the image non-local self-similarity is introduced as another
regularization term. In addition, the sparsity regularization parameter is
adaptively estimated for better image restoration performance. Extensive
experiments on image deblurring and super-resolution validate that by using
adaptive sparse domain selection and adaptive regularization, the proposed
method achieves much better results than many state-of-the-art algorithms in
terms of both PSNR and visual perception.Comment: 35 pages. This paper is under review in IEEE TI
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Bayesian Estimation of Intensity Surfaces on the Sphere via Needlet Shrinkage and Selection
This paper describes an approach for Bayesian modeling in spherical datasets. Our method is based upon a recent construction called the needlet, which is a particular form of spherical wavelet with many favorable statistical and computational properties. We perform shrinkage and selection of needlet coefficients, focusing on two main alternatives: empirical-Bayes thresholding, and Bayesian local shrinkage rules. We study the performance of the proposed methodology both on simulated data and on two real data sets: one involving the cosmic microwave background radiation, and one involving the reconstruction of a global news intensity surface inferred from published Reuters articles in August, 1996. The fully Bayesian approach based on robust, sparse shrinkage priors seems to outperform other alternatives.Business Administratio
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