Outlier robust corner-preserving methods for reconstructing noisy images

The ability to remove a large amount of noise and the ability to preserve most structure are desirable properties of an image smoother. Unfortunately, they usually seem to be at odds with each other; one can only improve one property at the cost of the other. By combining M-smoothing and least-squares-trimming, the TM-smoother is introduced as a means to unify corner-preserving properties and outlier robustness. To identify edge- and corner-preserving properties, a new theory based on differential geometry is developed. Further, robustness concepts are transferred to image processing. In two examples, the TM-smoother outperforms other corner-preserving smoothers. A software package containing both the TM- and the M-smoother can be downloaded from the Internet.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000001109 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A review of domain adaptation without target labels

Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based, feature-based and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to further research.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Direct Ensemble Estimation of Density Functionals

Estimating density functionals of analog sources is an important problem in statistical signal processing and information theory. Traditionally, estimating these quantities requires either making parametric assumptions about the underlying distributions or using non-parametric density estimation followed by integration. In this paper we introduce a direct nonparametric approach which bypasses the need for density estimation by using the error rates of k-NN classifiers asdata-driven basis functions that can be combined to estimate a range of density functionals. However, this method is subject to a non-trivial bias that dramatically slows the rate of convergence in higher dimensions. To overcome this limitation, we develop an ensemble method for estimating the value of the basis function which, under some minor constraints on the smoothness of the underlying distributions, achieves the parametric rate of convergence regardless of data dimension.Comment: 5 page

Learning how to be robust: Deep polynomial regression

Polynomial regression is a recurrent problem with a large number of applications. In computer vision it often appears in motion analysis. Whatever the application, standard methods for regression of polynomial models tend to deliver biased results when the input data is heavily contaminated by outliers. Moreover, the problem is even harder when outliers have strong structure. Departing from problem-tailored heuristics for robust estimation of parametric models, we explore deep convolutional neural networks. Our work aims to find a generic approach for training deep regression models without the explicit need of supervised annotation. We bypass the need for a tailored loss function on the regression parameters by attaching to our model a differentiable hard-wired decoder corresponding to the polynomial operation at hand. We demonstrate the value of our findings by comparing with standard robust regression methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use such models for a real computer vision problem, i.e., video stabilization. The qualitative and quantitative experiments show that neural networks are able to learn robustness for general polynomial regression, with results that well overpass scores of traditional robust estimation methods.Comment: 18 pages, conferenc

Nonlocal Myriad Filters for Cauchy Noise Removal

The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we introduce a generalized myriad filter, which is a method to compute the joint maximum likelihood estimator of the location and the scale parameter of the Cauchy distribution. Estimating only the location parameter is known as myriad filter. We propose an efficient algorithm to compute the generalized myriad filter and prove its convergence. Special cases of this algorithm result in the classical myriad filtering, respective an algorithm for estimating only the scale parameter. Based on an asymptotic analysis, we develop a second, even faster generalized myriad filtering technique. Second, we use our new approaches within a nonlocal, fully unsupervised method to denoise images corrupted by Cauchy noise. Special attention is paid to the determination of similar patches in noisy images. Numerical examples demonstrate the excellent performance of our algorithms which have moreover the advantage to be robust with respect to the parameter choice

Robust Orthogonal Complement Principal Component Analysis

Recently, the robustification of principal component analysis has attracted lots of attention from statisticians, engineers and computer scientists. In this work we study the type of outliers that are not necessarily apparent in the original observation space but can seriously affect the principal subspace estimation. Based on a mathematical formulation of such transformed outliers, a novel robust orthogonal complement principal component analysis (ROC-PCA) is proposed. The framework combines the popular sparsity-enforcing and low rank regularization techniques to deal with row-wise outliers as well as element-wise outliers. A non-asymptotic oracle inequality guarantees the accuracy and high breakdown performance of ROC-PCA in finite samples. To tackle the computational challenges, an efficient algorithm is developed on the basis of Stiefel manifold optimization and iterative thresholding. Furthermore, a batch variant is proposed to significantly reduce the cost in ultra high dimensions. The paper also points out a pitfall of a common practice of SVD reduction in robust PCA. Experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of ROC-PCA in both synthetic and real data