Sparse Modeling for Image and Vision Processing

In recent years, a large amount of multi-disciplinary research has been conducted on sparse models and their applications. In statistics and machine learning, the sparsity principle is used to perform model selection---that is, automatically selecting a simple model among a large collection of them. In signal processing, sparse coding consists of representing data with linear combinations of a few dictionary elements. Subsequently, the corresponding tools have been widely adopted by several scientific communities such as neuroscience, bioinformatics, or computer vision. The goal of this monograph is to offer a self-contained view of sparse modeling for visual recognition and image processing. More specifically, we focus on applications where the dictionary is learned and adapted to data, yielding a compact representation that has been successful in various contexts.Comment: 205 pages, to appear in Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Visio

Mathematical transforms and image compression: A review

It is well known that images, often used in a variety of computer and other scientific and engineering applications, are difficult to store and transmit due to their sizes. One possible solution to overcome this problem is to use an efficient digital image compression technique where an image is viewed as a matrix and then the operations are performed on the matrix. All the contemporary digital image compression systems use various mathematical transforms for compression. The compression performance is closely related to the performance by these mathematical transforms in terms of energy compaction and spatial frequency isolation by exploiting inter-pixel redundancies present in the image data. Through this paper, a comprehensive literature survey has been carried out and the pros and cons of various transform-based image compression models have also been discussed

On color image quality assessment using natural image statistics

Color distortion can introduce a significant damage in visual quality perception, however, most of existing reduced-reference quality measures are designed for grayscale images. In this paper, we consider a basic extension of well-known image-statistics based quality assessment measures to color images. In order to evaluate the impact of color information on the measures efficiency, two color spaces are investigated: RGB and CIELAB. Results of an extensive evaluation using TID 2013 benchmark demonstrates that significant improvement can be achieved for a great number of distortion type when the CIELAB color representation is used

Image Compression Techniques: A Survey in Lossless and Lossy algorithms

The bandwidth of the communication networks has been increased continuously as results of technological advances. However, the introduction of new services and the expansion of the existing ones have resulted in even higher demand for the bandwidth. This explains the many efforts currently being invested in the area of data compression. The primary goal of these works is to develop techniques of coding information sources such as speech, image and video to reduce the number of bits required to represent a source without significantly degrading its quality. With the large increase in the generation of digital image data, there has been a correspondingly large increase in research activity in the field of image compression. The goal is to represent an image in the fewest number of bits without losing the essential information content within. Images carry three main type of information: redundant, irrelevant, and useful. Redundant information is the deterministic part of the information, which can be reproduced without loss from other information contained in the image. Irrelevant information is the part of information that has enormous details, which are beyond the limit of perceptual significance (i.e., psychovisual redundancy). Useful information, on the other hand, is the part of information, which is neither redundant nor irrelevant. Human usually observes decompressed images. Therefore, their fidelities are subject to the capabilities and limitations of the Human Visual System. This paper provides a survey on various image compression techniques, their limitations, compression rates and highlights current research in medical image compression

Entropy in Image Analysis II

Image analysis is a fundamental task for any application where extracting information from images is required. The analysis requires highly sophisticated numerical and analytical methods, particularly for those applications in medicine, security, and other fields where the results of the processing consist of data of vital importance. This fact is evident from all the articles composing the Special Issue "Entropy in Image Analysis II", in which the authors used widely tested methods to verify their results. In the process of reading the present volume, the reader will appreciate the richness of their methods and applications, in particular for medical imaging and image security, and a remarkable cross-fertilization among the proposed research areas

Sparse Spike Coding : applications of Neuroscience to the processing of natural images

If modern computers are sometimes superior to humans in some specialized tasks such as playing chess or browsing a large database, they can't beat the efficiency of biological vision for such simple tasks as recognizing and following an object in a complex cluttered background. We present in this paper our attempt at outlining the dynamical, parallel and event-based representation for vision in the architecture of the central nervous system. We will illustrate this on static natural images by showing that in a signal matching framework, a L/LN (linear/non-linear) cascade may efficiently transform a sensory signal into a neural spiking signal and we will apply this framework to a model retina. However, this code gets redundant when using an over-complete basis as is necessary for modeling the primary visual cortex: we therefore optimize the efficiency cost by increasing the sparseness of the code. This is implemented by propagating and canceling redundant information using lateral interactions. We compare the efficiency of this representation in terms of compression as the reconstruction quality as a function of the coding length. This will correspond to a modification of the Matching Pursuit algorithm where the ArgMax function is optimized for competition, or Competition Optimized Matching Pursuit (COMP). We will in particular focus on bridging neuroscience and image processing and on the advantages of such an interdisciplinary approach.Comment: http://incm.cnrs-mrs.fr/LaurentPerrinet/Publications/Perrinet08spi

Adaptive polyphase subband decomposition structures for image compression

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Subband decomposition techniques have been extensively used for data coding and analysis. In most filter banks, the goal is to obtain subsampled signals corresponding to different spectral regions of the original data. However, this approach leads to various artifacts in images having spatially varying characteristics, such as images containing text, subtitles, or sharp edges. In this paper, adaptive filter banks with perfect reconstruction property are presented for such images. The filters of the decomposition structure which can be either linear or nonlinear vary according to the nature of the signal. This leads to improved image compression ratios. Simulation examples are presented

Critical Data Compression

A new approach to data compression is developed and applied to multimedia content. This method separates messages into components suitable for both lossless coding and 'lossy' or statistical coding techniques, compressing complex objects by separately encoding signals and noise. This is demonstrated by compressing the most significant bits of data exactly, since they are typically redundant and compressible, and either fitting a maximally likely noise function to the residual bits or compressing them using lossy methods. Upon decompression, the significant bits are decoded and added to a noise function, whether sampled from a noise model or decompressed from a lossy code. This results in compressed data similar to the original. For many test images, a two-part image code using JPEG2000 for lossy coding and PAQ8l for lossless coding produces less mean-squared error than an equal length of JPEG2000. Computer-generated images typically compress better using this method than through direct lossy coding, as do many black and white photographs and most color photographs at sufficiently high quality levels. Examples applying the method to audio and video coding are also demonstrated. Since two-part codes are efficient for both periodic and chaotic data, concatenations of roughly similar objects may be encoded efficiently, which leads to improved inference. Applications to artificial intelligence are demonstrated, showing that signals using an economical lossless code have a critical level of redundancy which leads to better description-based inference than signals which encode either insufficient data or too much detail.Comment: 99 pages, 31 figure