5,398 research outputs found
The Hough transform estimator
This article pursues a statistical study of the Hough transform, the
celebrated computer vision algorithm used to detect the presence of lines in a
noisy image. We first study asymptotic properties of the Hough transform
estimator, whose objective is to find the line that ``best'' fits a set of
planar points. In particular, we establish strong consistency and rates of
convergence, and characterize the limiting distribution of the Hough transform
estimator. While the convergence rates are seen to be slower than those found
in some standard regression methods, the Hough transform estimator is shown to
be more robust as measured by its breakdown point. We next study the Hough
transform in the context of the problem of detecting multiple lines. This is
addressed via the framework of excess mass functionals and modality testing.
Throughout, several numerical examples help illustrate various properties of
the estimator. Relations between the Hough transform and more mainstream
statistical paradigms and methods are discussed as well.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053604000000760 in the
Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Outlier robust corner-preserving methods for reconstructing noisy images
The ability to remove a large amount of noise and the ability to preserve
most structure are desirable properties of an image smoother. Unfortunately,
they usually seem to be at odds with each other; one can only improve one
property at the cost of the other. By combining M-smoothing and
least-squares-trimming, the TM-smoother is introduced as a means to unify
corner-preserving properties and outlier robustness. To identify edge- and
corner-preserving properties, a new theory based on differential geometry is
developed. Further, robustness concepts are transferred to image processing. In
two examples, the TM-smoother outperforms other corner-preserving smoothers. A
software package containing both the TM- and the M-smoother can be downloaded
from the Internet.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000001109 in the
Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Robust Orthogonal Complement Principal Component Analysis
Recently, the robustification of principal component analysis has attracted
lots of attention from statisticians, engineers and computer scientists. In
this work we study the type of outliers that are not necessarily apparent in
the original observation space but can seriously affect the principal subspace
estimation. Based on a mathematical formulation of such transformed outliers, a
novel robust orthogonal complement principal component analysis (ROC-PCA) is
proposed. The framework combines the popular sparsity-enforcing and low rank
regularization techniques to deal with row-wise outliers as well as
element-wise outliers. A non-asymptotic oracle inequality guarantees the
accuracy and high breakdown performance of ROC-PCA in finite samples. To tackle
the computational challenges, an efficient algorithm is developed on the basis
of Stiefel manifold optimization and iterative thresholding. Furthermore, a
batch variant is proposed to significantly reduce the cost in ultra high
dimensions. The paper also points out a pitfall of a common practice of SVD
reduction in robust PCA. Experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of
ROC-PCA in both synthetic and real data
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