Implementation and Validation of Visual and Infrared Image Fusion Techniques in C# .NET Environment

This paper presents the implementation of image fusion techniques by means of an image fusion application “C#ImFuse”, developed in C#.NET. C# programming language is a simple, type-safe, object-oriented language that allows programmers to build a variety of applications. C#ImFuse application implements four fusion methods viz., Alpha Blending (AB), Principle Component Analysis (PCA), Laplacian Pyramid (LP), and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for a visual and a thermal image (still images) and for real-time images of the Enhanced Vision System (EVS). The performance of these fusion techniques is evaluated using fusion performance metrics. LP based image fusion technique proved to provide better fusion when compared to the other techniques. Source code is provided so that the reader can understand the techniques and use for his research work

Efficient denoising approach based eulerian video magnification for colour and motion variations

Digital video magnification is a computer-based microscope, which is useful to detect subtle changes to human eyes in recorded videos. This technology can be employed in several areas such as medical, biological, mechanical and physical applications. Eulerian is the most popular approach in video magnification. However, amplifying the subtle changes in video produces amplifying the subtle noise. This paper proposes an approach to reduce amplified noise in magnified video for both type of changes amplifications, color and motion. The proposed approach processes the resulted video from Eulerian algorithm whether linear or phase based in order to noise cancellation. The approach utilizes wavelet denoising method to localize the frequencies of distributed noise over the different frequency bands. Subsequently, the energy of the coefficients under localized frequencies are attenuated by attenuating the amplitude of these coefficients. The experimental results of the proposed approach show its superiority over conventional linear and phase based Eulerian video magnification approaches in terms of quality of the resulted magnified videos. This allows to amplify the videos by larger amplification factor, so that several new applications can be added to the list of Eulerian video magnification users. Furthermore, the processing time does not significantly increase, the increment is only less than 3% of the overall processing compare to conventional Eulerian video magnification

Stylizing Face Images via Multiple Exemplars

We address the problem of transferring the style of a headshot photo to face images. Existing methods using a single exemplar lead to inaccurate results when the exemplar does not contain sufficient stylized facial components for a given photo. In this work, we propose an algorithm to stylize face images using multiple exemplars containing different subjects in the same style. Patch correspondences between an input photo and multiple exemplars are established using a Markov Random Field (MRF), which enables accurate local energy transfer via Laplacian stacks. As image patches from multiple exemplars are used, the boundaries of facial components on the target image are inevitably inconsistent. The artifacts are removed by a post-processing step using an edge-preserving filter. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm consistently produces visually pleasing results.Comment: In CVIU 2017. Project Page: http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~yibisong/cviu17/index.htm

Multimodal enhancement-fusion technique for natural images.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.This dissertation presents a multimodal enhancement-fusion (MEF) technique for natural images. The MEF is expected to contribute value to machine vision applications and personal image collections for the human user. Image enhancement techniques and the metrics that are used to assess their performance are prolific, and each is usually optimised for a specific objective. The MEF proposes a framework that adaptively fuses multiple enhancement objectives into a seamless pipeline. Given a segmented input image and a set of enhancement methods, the MEF applies all the enhancers to the image in parallel. The most appropriate enhancement in each image segment is identified, and finally, the differentially enhanced segments are seamlessly fused. To begin with, this dissertation studies targeted contrast enhancement methods and performance metrics that can be utilised in the proposed MEF. It addresses a selection of objective assessment metrics for contrast-enhanced images and determines their relationship with the subjective assessment of human visual systems. This is to identify which objective metrics best approximate human assessment and may therefore be used as an effective replacement for tedious human assessment surveys. A subsequent human visual assessment survey is conducted on the same dataset to ascertain image quality as perceived by a human observer. The interrelated concepts of naturalness and detail were found to be key motivators of human visual assessment. Findings show that when assessing the quality or accuracy of these methods, no single quantitative metric correlates well with human perception of naturalness and detail, however, a combination of two or more metrics may be used to approximate the complex human visual response. Thereafter, this dissertation proposes the multimodal enhancer that adaptively selects the optimal enhancer for each image segment. MEF focusses on improving chromatic irregularities such as poor contrast distribution. It deploys a concurrent enhancement pathway that subjects an image to multiple image enhancers in parallel, followed by a fusion algorithm that creates a composite image that combines the strengths of each enhancement path. The study develops a framework for parallel image enhancement, followed by parallel image assessment and selection, leading to final merging of selected regions from the enhanced set. The output combines desirable attributes from each enhancement pathway to produce a result that is superior to each path taken alone. The study showed that the proposed MEF technique performs well for most image types. MEF is subjectively favourable to a human panel and achieves better performance for objective image quality assessment compared to other enhancement methods

A statistical reduced-reference method for color image quality assessment

Although color is a fundamental feature of human visual perception, it has been largely unexplored in the reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) schemes. In this paper, we propose a natural scene statistic (NSS) method, which efficiently uses this information. It is based on the statistical deviation between the steerable pyramid coefficients of the reference color image and the degraded one. We propose and analyze the multivariate generalized Gaussian distribution (MGGD) to model the underlying statistics. In order to quantify the degradation, we develop and evaluate two measures based respectively on the Geodesic distance between two MGGDs and on the closed-form of the Kullback Leibler divergence. We performed an extensive evaluation of both metrics in various color spaces (RGB, HSV, CIELAB and YCrCb) using the TID 2008 benchmark and the FRTV Phase I validation process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework to achieve a good consistency with human visual perception. Furthermore, the best configuration is obtained with CIELAB color space associated to KLD deviation measure

RADAR Image Fusion Using Wavelet Transform

RADAR Images are strongly preferred for analysis of geospatial information about earth surface to assesse envirmental conditions radar images are captured by different remote sensors and that images are combined together to get complementary information. To collect radar images SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) sensors are used which are active sensors and can gather information during day and night without affecting weather conditions. We have discussed DCT and DWT image fusion methods,which gives us more informative fused image simultaneously we have checked performance parameters among these two methods to get superior method from these two techniques

Analysis of reported error in Monte Carlo rendered images

Evaluating image quality in Monte Carlo rendered images is an important aspect of the rendering process as we often need to determine the relative quality between images computed using different algorithms and with varying amounts of computation. The use of a gold-standard, reference image, or ground truth (GT) is a common method to provide a baseline with which to compare experimental results. We show that if not chosen carefully the reference image can skew results leading to significant misreporting of error. We present an analysis of error in Monte Carlo rendered images and discuss practices to avoid or be aware of when designing an experiment