Fully Convolutional Network with Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning for Image Processing

This paper tackles a new problem setting: reinforcement learning with pixel-wise rewards (pixelRL) for image processing. After the introduction of the deep Q-network, deep RL has been achieving great success. However, the applications of deep RL for image processing are still limited. Therefore, we extend deep RL to pixelRL for various image processing applications. In pixelRL, each pixel has an agent, and the agent changes the pixel value by taking an action. We also propose an effective learning method for pixelRL that significantly improves the performance by considering not only the future states of the own pixel but also those of the neighbor pixels. The proposed method can be applied to some image processing tasks that require pixel-wise manipulations, where deep RL has never been applied. We apply the proposed method to three image processing tasks: image denoising, image restoration, and local color enhancement. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable or better performance, compared with the state-of-the-art methods based on supervised learning.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

The Filament Sensor for Near Real-Time Detection of Cytoskeletal Fiber Structures

A reliable extraction of filament data from microscopic images is of high interest in the analysis of acto-myosin structures as early morphological markers in mechanically guided differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells and the understanding of the underlying fiber arrangement processes. In this paper, we propose the filament sensor (FS), a fast and robust processing sequence which detects and records location, orientation, length and width for each single filament of an image, and thus allows for the above described analysis. The extraction of these features has previously not been possible with existing methods. We evaluate the performance of the proposed FS in terms of accuracy and speed in comparison to three existing methods with respect to their limited output. Further, we provide a benchmark dataset of real cell images along with filaments manually marked by a human expert as well as simulated benchmark images. The FS clearly outperforms existing methods in terms of computational runtime and filament extraction accuracy. The implementation of the FS and the benchmark database are available as open source.Comment: 32 pages, 21 figure

Guided patch-wise nonlocal SAR despeckling

We propose a new method for SAR image despeckling which leverages information drawn from co-registered optical imagery. Filtering is performed by plain patch-wise nonlocal means, operating exclusively on SAR data. However, the filtering weights are computed by taking into account also the optical guide, which is much cleaner than the SAR data, and hence more discriminative. To avoid injecting optical-domain information into the filtered image, a SAR-domain statistical test is preliminarily performed to reject right away any risky predictor. Experiments on two SAR-optical datasets prove the proposed method to suppress very effectively the speckle, preserving structural details, and without introducing visible filtering artifacts. Overall, the proposed method compares favourably with all state-of-the-art despeckling filters, and also with our own previous optical-guided filter