Graph Spectral Image Processing

Recent advent of graph signal processing (GSP) has spurred intensive studies of signals that live naturally on irregular data kernels described by graphs (e.g., social networks, wireless sensor networks). Though a digital image contains pixels that reside on a regularly sampled 2D grid, if one can design an appropriate underlying graph connecting pixels with weights that reflect the image structure, then one can interpret the image (or image patch) as a signal on a graph, and apply GSP tools for processing and analysis of the signal in graph spectral domain. In this article, we overview recent graph spectral techniques in GSP specifically for image / video processing. The topics covered include image compression, image restoration, image filtering and image segmentation

Partially Linear Estimation with Application to Sparse Signal Recovery From Measurement Pairs

We address the problem of estimating a random vector X from two sets of measurements Y and Z, such that the estimator is linear in Y. We show that the partially linear minimum mean squared error (PLMMSE) estimator does not require knowing the joint distribution of X and Y in full, but rather only its second-order moments. This renders it of potential interest in various applications. We further show that the PLMMSE method is minimax-optimal among all estimators that solely depend on the second-order statistics of X and Y. We demonstrate our approach in the context of recovering a signal, which is sparse in a unitary dictionary, from noisy observations of it and of a filtered version of it. We show that in this setting PLMMSE estimation has a clear computational advantage, while its performance is comparable to state-of-the-art algorithms. We apply our approach both in static and dynamic estimation applications. In the former category, we treat the problem of image enhancement from blurred/noisy image pairs, where we show that PLMMSE estimation performs only slightly worse than state-of-the art algorithms, while running an order of magnitude faster. In the dynamic setting, we provide a recursive implementation of the estimator and demonstrate its utility in the context of tracking maneuvering targets from position and acceleration measurements.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

A variational Bayesian method for inverse problems with impulsive noise

We propose a novel numerical method for solving inverse problems subject to impulsive noises which possibly contain a large number of outliers. The approach is of Bayesian type, and it exploits a heavy-tailed t distribution for data noise to achieve robustness with respect to outliers. A hierarchical model with all hyper-parameters automatically determined from the given data is described. An algorithm of variational type by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the true posteriori distribution and a separable approximation is developed. The numerical method is illustrated on several one- and two-dimensional linear and nonlinear inverse problems arising from heat conduction, including estimating boundary temperature, heat flux and heat transfer coefficient. The results show its robustness to outliers and the fast and steady convergence of the algorithm.Comment: 20 pages, to appear in J. Comput. Phy