An efficient adaptive fusion scheme for multifocus images in wavelet domain using statistical properties of neighborhood

In this paper we present a novel fusion rule which can efficiently fuse multifocus images in wavelet domain by taking weighted average of pixels. The weights are adaptively decided using the statistical properties of the neighborhood. The main idea is that the eigen value of unbiased estimate of the covariance matrix of an image block depends on the strength of edges in the block and thus makes a good choice for weight to be given to the pixel, giving more weightage to pixel with sharper neighborhood. The performance of the proposed method have been extensively tested on several pairs of multifocus images and also compared quantitatively with various existing methods with the help of well known parameters including Petrovic and Xydeas image fusion metric. Experimental results show that performance evaluation based on entropy, gradient, contrast or deviation, the criteria widely used for fusion analysis, may not be enough. This work demonstrates that in some cases, these evaluation criteria are not consistent with the ground truth. It also demonstrates that Petrovic and Xydeas image fusion metric is a more appropriate criterion, as it is in correlation with ground truth as well as visual quality in all the tested fused images. The proposed novel fusion rule significantly improves contrast information while preserving edge information. The major achievement of the work is that it significantly increases the quality of the fused image, both visually and in terms of quantitative parameters, especially sharpness with minimum fusion artifacts

Design and Analysis of A New Illumination Invariant Human Face Recognition System

In this dissertation we propose the design and analysis of a new illumination invariant face recognition system. We show that the multiscale analysis of facial structure and features of face images leads to superior recognition rates for images under varying illumination. We assume that an image I ( x,y ) is a black box consisting of a combination of illumination and reflectance. A new approximation is proposed to enhance the illumination removal phase. As illumination resides in the low-frequency part of images, a high-performance multiresolution transformation is employed to accurately separate the frequency contents of input images. The procedure is followed by a fine-tuning process. After extracting a mask, feature vector is formed and the principal component analysis (PCA) is used for dimensionality reduction which is then proceeded by the extreme learning machine (ELM) as a classifier. We then analyze the effect of the frequency selectivity of subbands of the transformation on the performance of the proposed face recognition system. In fact, we first propose a method to tune the characteristics of a multiresolution transformation, and then analyze how these specifications may affect the recognition rate. In addition, we show that the proposed face recognition system can be further improved in terms of the computational time and accuracy. The motivation for this progress is related to the fact that although illumination mostly lies in the low-frequency part of images, these low-frequency components may have low- or high-resonance nature. Therefore, for the first time, we introduce the resonance based analysis of face images rather than the traditional frequency domain approaches. We found that energy selectivity of the subbands of the resonance based decomposition can lead to superior results with less computational complexity. The method is free of any prior information about the face shape. It is systematic and can be applied separately on each image. Several experiments are performed employing the well known databases such as the Yale B, Extended-Yale B, CMU-PIE, FERET, AT&T, and LFW. Illustrative examples are given and the results confirm the effectiveness of the method compared to the current results in the literature

Multisensor Concealed Weapon Detection Using the Image Fusion Approach

Detection of concealed weapons is an increasingly important problem for both military and police since global terrorism and crime have grown as threats over the years. This work presents two image fusion algorithms, one at pixel level and another at feature level, for efficient concealed weapon detection application. Both the algorithms presented in this work are based on the double-density dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DDDTCWT). In the pixel level fusion scheme, the fusion of low frequency band coefficients is determined by the local contrast, while the high frequency band fusion rule is developed with consideration of both texture feature of the human visual system (HVS) and local energy basis. In the feature level fusion algorithm, features are exacted using Gaussian Mixture model (GMM) based multiscale segmentation approach and the fusion rules are developed based on region activity measurement. Experiment results demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms

Modeling and applications of the focus cue in conventional digital cameras

El enfoque en cámaras digitales juega un papel fundamental tanto en la calidad de la imagen como en la percepción del entorno. Esta tesis estudia el enfoque en cámaras digitales convencionales, tales como cámaras de móviles, fotográficas, webcams y similares. Una revisión rigurosa de los conceptos teóricos detras del enfoque en cámaras convencionales muestra que, a pasar de su utilidad, el modelo clásico del thin lens presenta muchas limitaciones para aplicación en diferentes problemas relacionados con el foco. En esta tesis, el focus profile es propuesto como una alternativa a conceptos clásicos como la profundidad de campo. Los nuevos conceptos introducidos en esta tesis son aplicados a diferentes problemas relacionados con el foco, tales como la adquisición eficiente de imágenes, estimación de profundidad, integración de elementos perceptuales y fusión de imágenes. Los resultados experimentales muestran la aplicación exitosa de los modelos propuestos.The focus of digital cameras plays a fundamental role in both the quality of the acquired images and the perception of the imaged scene. This thesis studies the focus cue in conventional cameras with focus control, such as cellphone cameras, photography cameras, webcams and the like. A deep review of the theoretical concepts behind focus in conventional cameras reveals that, despite its usefulness, the widely known thin lens model has several limitations for solving different focus-related problems in computer vision. In order to overcome these limitations, the focus profile model is introduced as an alternative to classic concepts, such as the near and far limits of the depth-of-field. The new concepts introduced in this dissertation are exploited for solving diverse focus-related problems, such as efficient image capture, depth estimation, visual cue integration and image fusion. The results obtained through an exhaustive experimental validation demonstrate the applicability of the proposed models

A Better Looking Brain: Image Pre-Processing Approaches for fMRI Data

Researchers in the field of functional neuroimaging have faced a long standing problem in pre-processing low spatial resolution data without losing meaningful details within. Commonly, the brain function is recorded by a technique known as echo-planar imaging that represents the measure of blood flow (BOLD signal) through a particular location in the brain as an array of intensity values changing over time. This approach to record a movie of blood flow in the brain is known as fMRI. The neural activity is then studied from the temporal correlation patterns existing within the fMRI time series. However, the resulting images are noisy and contain low spatial detail, thus making it imperative to pre-process them appropriately to derive meaningful activation patterns. Two of the several standard preprocessing steps employed just before the analysis stage are denoising and normalization. Fundamentally, it is difficult to perfectly remove noise from an image without making assumptions about signal and noise distributions. A convenient and commonly used alternative is to smooth the image with a Gaussian filter, but this method suffers from various obvious drawbacks, primarily loss of spatial detail. A greater challenge arises when we attempt to derive average activation patterns from fMRI images acquired from a group of individuals. The brain of one individual differs from others in a structural sense as well as in a functional sense. Commonly, the inter-individual differences in anatomical structures are compensated for by co-registering each subject\u27s data to a common normalization space, known as spatial normalization. However, there are no existing methods to compensate for the differences in functional organization of the brain. This work presents first steps towards data-driven robust algorithms for fMRI image denoising and multi-subject image normalization by utilizing inherent information within fMRI data. In addition, a new validation approach based on spatial shape of the activation regions is presented to quantify the effects of preprocessing and also as a tool to record the differences in activation patterns between individual subjects or within two groups such as healthy controls and patients with mental illness. Qualititative and quantitative results of the proposed framework compare favorably against existing and widely used model-driven approaches such as Gaussian smoothing and structure-based spatial normalization. This work is intended to provide neuroscience researchers tools to derive more meaningful activation patterns to accurately identify imaging biomarkers for various neurodevelopmental diseases and also maximize the specificity of a diagnosis

Wavelet Shrinkage Based Image Denoising using Soft Computing

Noise reduction is an open problem and has received considerable attention in the literature for several decades. Over the last two decades, wavelet based methods have been applied to the problem of noise reduction and have been shown to outperform the traditional Wiener filter, Median filter, and modified Lee filter in terms of root mean squared error (MSE), peak signal noise ratio (PSNR) and other evaluation methods. In this research, two approaches for the development of high performance algorithms for de-noising are proposed, both based on soft computing tools, such as fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. First, an improved additive noise reduction method for digital grey scale nature images, which uses an interval type-2 fuzzy logic system to shrink wavelet coefficients, is proposed. This method is an extension of a recently published approach for additive noise reduction using a type-1 fuzzy logic system based wavelet shrinkage. Unlike the type-1 fuzzy logic system based wavelet shrinkage method, the proposed approach employs a thresholding filter to adjust the wavelet coefficients according to the linguistic uncertainty in neighborhood values, inter-scale dependencies and intra-scale correlations of wavelet coefficients at different resolutions by exploiting the interval type-2 fuzzy set theory. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can efficiently and rapidly remove additive noise from digital grey scale images. Objective analysis and visual observations show that the proposed approach outperforms current fuzzy non-wavelet methods and fuzzy wavelet based methods, and is comparable with some recent but more complex wavelet methods, such as Hidden Markov Model based additive noise de-noising method. The main differences between the proposed approach and other wavelet shrinkage based approaches and the main improvements of the proposed approach are also illustrated in this thesis. Second, another improved method of additive noise reduction is also proposed. The method is based on fusing the results of different filters using a Fuzzy Neural Network (FNN). The proposed method combines the advantages of these filters and has outstanding ability of smoothing out additive noise while preserving details of an image (e.g. edges and lines) effectively. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied to choose the optimal parameters of the FNN. The experimental results show that the proposed method is powerful for removing noise from natural images, and the MSE of this approach is less, and the PSNR of is higher, than that of any individual filters which are used for fusion. Finally, the two proposed approaches are compared with each other from different point of views, such as objective analysis in terms of mean squared error(MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), image quality index (IQI) based on quality assessment of distorted images, and Information Theoretic Criterion (ITC) based on a human vision model, computational cost, universality, and human observation. The results show that the proposed FNN based algorithm optimized by GA has the best performance among all testing approaches. Important considerations for these proposed approaches and future work are discussed

Overcomplete Image Representations for Texture Analysis

Advisor/s: Dr. Boris Escalante-Ramírez and Dr. Gabriel Cristóbal. Date and location of PhD thesis defense: 23th October 2013, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.In recent years, computer vision has played an important role in many scientific and technological areas mainlybecause modern society highlights vision over other senses. At the same time, application requirements and complexity have also increased so that in many cases the optimal solution depends on the intrinsic charac-teristics of the problem; therefore, it is difficult to propose a universal image model. In parallel, advances in understanding the human visual system have allowed to propose sophisticated models that incorporate simple phenomena which occur in early stages of the visual system. This dissertation aims to investigate characteristicsof vision such as over-representation and orientation of receptive fields in order to propose bio-inspired image models for texture analysis