"Rewiring" Filterbanks for Local Fourier Analysis: Theory and Practice

This article describes a series of new results outlining equivalences between certain "rewirings" of filterbank system block diagrams, and the corresponding actions of convolution, modulation, and downsampling operators. This gives rise to a general framework of reverse-order and convolution subband structures in filterbank transforms, which we show to be well suited to the analysis of filterbank coefficients arising from subsampled or multiplexed signals. These results thus provide a means to understand time-localized aliasing and modulation properties of such signals and their subband representations--notions that are notably absent from the global viewpoint afforded by Fourier analysis. The utility of filterbank rewirings is demonstrated by the closed-form analysis of signals subject to degradations such as missing data, spatially or temporally multiplexed data acquisition, or signal-dependent noise, such as are often encountered in practical signal processing applications

The role of lossless systems in modern digital signal processing: a tutorial

A self-contained discussion of discrete-time lossless systems and their properties and relevance in digital signal processing is presented. The basic concept of losslessness is introduced, and several algebraic properties of lossless systems are studied. An understanding of these properties is crucial in order to exploit the rich usefulness of lossless systems in digital signal processing. Since lossless systems typically have many input and output terminals, a brief review of multiinput multioutput systems is included. The most general form of a rational lossless transfer matrix is presented along with synthesis procedures for the FIR (finite impulse response) case. Some applications of lossless systems in signal processing are presented

Theory and design of uniform DFT, parallel, quadrature mirror filter banks

In this paper, the theory of uniform DFT, parallel, quadrature mirror filter (QMF) banks is developed. The QMF equations, i.e., equations that need to be satisfied for exact reconstruction of the input signal, are derived. The concept of decimated filters is introduced, and structures for both analysis and synthesis banks are derived using this concept. The QMF equations, as well as closed-form expressions for the synthesis filters needed for exact reconstruction of the input signalx(n), are also derived using this concept. In general, the reconstructed. signalhat{x}(n)suffers from three errors: aliasing, amplitude distortion, and phase distortion. Conditions for exact reconstruction (i.e., all three distortions are zero, andhat{x}(n)is equal to a delayed version ofx(n))of the input signal are derived in terms of the decimated filters. Aliasing distortion can always be completely canceled. Once aliasing is canceled, it is possible to completely eliminate amplitude distortion (if suitable IIR filters are employed) and completely eliminate phase distortion (if suitable FIR filters are employed). However, complete elimination of all three errors is possible only with some simple, pathalogical stable filter transfer functions. In general, once aliasing is canceled, the other distortions can be minimized rather than completely eliminated. Algorithms for this are presented. The properties of FIR filter banks are then investigated. Several aspects of IIR filter banks are also studied using the same framework

Multispectral Palmprint Encoding and Recognition

Palmprints are emerging as a new entity in multi-modal biometrics for human identification and verification. Multispectral palmprint images captured in the visible and infrared spectrum not only contain the wrinkles and ridge structure of a palm, but also the underlying pattern of veins; making them a highly discriminating biometric identifier. In this paper, we propose a feature encoding scheme for robust and highly accurate representation and matching of multispectral palmprints. To facilitate compact storage of the feature, we design a binary hash table structure that allows for efficient matching in large databases. Comprehensive experiments for both identification and verification scenarios are performed on two public datasets -- one captured with a contact-based sensor (PolyU dataset), and the other with a contact-free sensor (CASIA dataset). Recognition results in various experimental setups show that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Error rates achieved by our method (0.003% on PolyU and 0.2% on CASIA) are the lowest reported in literature on both dataset and clearly indicate the viability of palmprint as a reliable and promising biometric. All source codes are publicly available.Comment: Preliminary version of this manuscript was published in ICCV 2011. Z. Khan A. Mian and Y. Hu, "Contour Code: Robust and Efficient Multispectral Palmprint Encoding for Human Recognition", International Conference on Computer Vision, 2011. MATLAB Code available: https://sites.google.com/site/zohaibnet/Home/code

A Framework for Symmetric Part Detection in Cluttered Scenes

The role of symmetry in computer vision has waxed and waned in importance during the evolution of the field from its earliest days. At first figuring prominently in support of bottom-up indexing, it fell out of favor as shape gave way to appearance and recognition gave way to detection. With a strong prior in the form of a target object, the role of the weaker priors offered by perceptual grouping was greatly diminished. However, as the field returns to the problem of recognition from a large database, the bottom-up recovery of the parts that make up the objects in a cluttered scene is critical for their recognition. The medial axis community has long exploited the ubiquitous regularity of symmetry as a basis for the decomposition of a closed contour into medial parts. However, today's recognition systems are faced with cluttered scenes, and the assumption that a closed contour exists, i.e. that figure-ground segmentation has been solved, renders much of the medial axis community's work inapplicable. In this article, we review a computational framework, previously reported in Lee et al. (2013), Levinshtein et al. (2009, 2013), that bridges the representation power of the medial axis and the need to recover and group an object's parts in a cluttered scene. Our framework is rooted in the idea that a maximally inscribed disc, the building block of a medial axis, can be modeled as a compact superpixel in the image. We evaluate the method on images of cluttered scenes.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure