Interpolating orientation fields : an axiomatic approach

International audienc

A Novel Inpainting Framework for Virtual View Synthesis

Multi-view imaging has stimulated significant research to enhance the user experience of free viewpoint video, allowing interactive navigation between views and the freedom to select a desired view to watch. This usually involves transmitting both textural and depth information captured from different viewpoints to the receiver, to enable the synthesis of an arbitrary view. In rendering these virtual views, perceptual holes can appear due to certain regions, hidden in the original view by a closer object, becoming visible in the virtual view. To provide a high quality experience these holes must be filled in a visually plausible way, in a process known as inpainting. This is challenging because the missing information is generally unknown and the hole-regions can be large. Recently depth-based inpainting techniques have been proposed to address this challenge and while these generally perform better than non-depth assisted methods, they are not very robust and can produce perceptual artefacts. This thesis presents a new inpainting framework that innovatively exploits depth and textural self-similarity characteristics to construct subjectively enhanced virtual viewpoints. The framework makes three significant contributions to the field: i) the exploitation of view information to jointly inpaint textural and depth hole regions; ii) the introduction of the novel concept of self-similarity characterisation which is combined with relevant depth information; and iii) an advanced self-similarity characterising scheme that automatically determines key spatial transform parameters for effective and flexible inpainting. The presented inpainting framework has been critically analysed and shown to provide superior performance both perceptually and numerically compared to existing techniques, especially in terms of lower visual artefacts. It provides a flexible robust framework to develop new inpainting strategies for the next generation of interactive multi-view technologies

Novel Motion Anchoring Strategies for Wavelet-based Highly Scalable Video Compression

This thesis investigates new motion anchoring strategies that are targeted at wavelet-based highly scalable video compression (WSVC). We depart from two practices that are deeply ingrained in existing video compression systems. Instead of the commonly used block motion, which has poor scalability attributes, we employ piecewise-smooth motion together with a highly scalable motion boundary description. The combination of this more “physical” motion description together with motion discontinuity information allows us to change the conventional strategy of anchoring motion at target frames to anchoring motion at reference frames, which improves motion inference across time. In the proposed reference-based motion anchoring strategies, motion fields are mapped from reference to target frames, where they serve as prediction references; during this mapping process, disoccluded regions are readily discovered. Observing that motion discontinuities displace with foreground objects, we propose motion-discontinuity driven motion mapping operations that handle traditionally challenging regions around moving objects. The reference-based motion anchoring exposes an intricate connection between temporal frame interpolation (TFI) and video compression. When employed in a compression system, all anchoring strategies explored in this thesis perform TFI once all residual information is quantized to zero at a given temporal level. The interpolation performance is evaluated on both natural and synthetic sequences, where we show favourable comparisons with state-of-the-art TFI schemes. We explore three reference-based motion anchoring strategies. In the first one, the motion anchoring is “flipped” with respect to a hierarchical B-frame structure. We develop an analytical model to determine the weights of the different spatio-temporal subbands, and assess the suitability and benefits of this reference-based WSVC for (highly scalable) video compression. Reduced motion coding cost and improved frame prediction, especially around moving objects, result in improved rate-distortion performance compared to a target-based WSVC. As the thesis evolves, the motion anchoring is progressively simplified to one where all motion is anchored at one base frame; this central motion organization facilitates the incorporation of higher-order motion models, which improve the prediction performance in regions following motion with non-constant velocity

Mini-Workshop: Analytical and Numerical Methods in Image and Surface Processing

The workshop successfully brought together researchers from mathematical analysis, numerical mathematics, computer graphics and image processing. The focus was on variational methods in image and surface processing such as active contour models, Mumford-Shah type functionals, image and surface denoising based on geometric evolution problems in image and surface fairing, physical modeling of surfaces, the restoration of images and surfaces using higher order variational formulations

STRUCTURE AND TEXTURE SYNTHESIS

An approach for filling-in blocks of missing data in wireless image transmission is presented in this paper. When compression algorithms such as JPEG are used as part of the wireless transmission process, images are first tiled into blocks of 8x8 pixels. When such images are transmitted over fading channels, the effects of noise can destroy entire blocks of the image. Instead of using common retransmission query protocols, we aim to reconstruct the lost data using correlation between the lost block and its neighbours. If the lost block contained structure, it is reconstructed using an image inpainting algorithm, while texture synthesis is used for the textured blocks. The switch between the two schemes is done in a fully automatic fashion based on the surrounding available blocks. The performance of this method is tested for various images and combinations of lost blocks

Image inpainting by global structure and texture propagation.

Huang, Ting.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-41).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Related Area --- p.2Chapter 1.2 --- Previous Work --- p.4Chapter 1.3 --- Proposed Framework --- p.7Chapter 1.4 --- Overview --- p.8Chapter 2 --- Markov Random Fields and Optimization Schemes --- p.9Chapter 2.1 --- MRF Model --- p.10Chapter 2.1.1 --- MAP Understanding --- p.11Chapter 2.2 --- Belief Propagation Optimization Scheme --- p.14Chapter 2.2.1 --- Max-Product BP on MRFs --- p.14Chapter 2.2.2 --- Sum-Product BP on MRFs --- p.15Chapter 3 --- Our Formulation --- p.17Chapter 3.1 --- An MRF Model --- p.18Chapter 3.2 --- Coarse-to-Fine Optimization by BP --- p.21Chapter 3.2.1 --- Coarse-Level Belief Propagation --- p.23Chapter 3.2.2 --- Fine-Level Belief Propagation --- p.24Chapter 3.2.3 --- Performance Enhancement --- p.25Chapter 4 --- Experiments --- p.27Chapter 4.1 --- Comparison --- p.27Chapter 4.2 --- Failure Case --- p.32Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.35Bibliography --- p.3

Inpainting of Cyclic Data using First and Second Order Differences

Cyclic data arise in various image and signal processing applications such as interferometric synthetic aperture radar, electroencephalogram data analysis, and color image restoration in HSV or LCh spaces. In this paper we introduce a variational inpainting model for cyclic data which utilizes our definition of absolute cyclic second order differences. Based on analytical expressions for the proximal mappings of these differences we propose a cyclic proximal point algorithm (CPPA) for minimizing the corresponding functional. We choose appropriate cycles to implement this algorithm in an efficient way. We further introduce a simple strategy to initialize the unknown inpainting region. Numerical results both for synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the performance of our algorithm.Comment: accepted Converence Paper at EMMCVPR'1

Image inpainting

Trabajo presentado en la 27th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive TechniquesInpainting, the technique of modifying an image in an undetectable form, is as ancient as art itself. The goals and applications of inpainting are numerous, from the restoration of damaged paintings and photographs to the removal/replacement of selected objects. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm for digital inpainting of still images that attempts to replicate the basic techniques used by professional restorators. After the user selects the regions to be restored, the algorithm automatically fills-in these regions with information surrounding them. The fill-in is done in such a way that isophote lines arriving at the regions’ boundaries are completed inside. In contrast with previous approaches, the technique here introduced does not require the user to specify where the novel information comes from. This is automatically done (and in a fast way), thereby allowing to simultaneously fill-in numerous regions containing completely different structures and surrounding backgrounds. In addition, no limitations are imposed on the topology of the region to be inpainted. Applications of this technique include the restoration of old photographs and damaged film; removal of superimposed text like dates, subtitles, or publicity; and the removal of entire objects from the image like microphones or wires in special effects