Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement

Performance is a critical challenge in mobile image processing. Given a reference imaging pipeline, or even human-adjusted pairs of images, we seek to reproduce the enhancements and enable real-time evaluation. For this, we introduce a new neural network architecture inspired by bilateral grid processing and local affine color transforms. Using pairs of input/output images, we train a convolutional neural network to predict the coefficients of a locally-affine model in bilateral space. Our architecture learns to make local, global, and content-dependent decisions to approximate the desired image transformation. At runtime, the neural network consumes a low-resolution version of the input image, produces a set of affine transformations in bilateral space, upsamples those transformations in an edge-preserving fashion using a new slicing node, and then applies those upsampled transformations to the full-resolution image. Our algorithm processes high-resolution images on a smartphone in milliseconds, provides a real-time viewfinder at 1080p resolution, and matches the quality of state-of-the-art approximation techniques on a large class of image operators. Unlike previous work, our model is trained off-line from data and therefore does not require access to the original operator at runtime. This allows our model to learn complex, scene-dependent transformations for which no reference implementation is available, such as the photographic edits of a human retoucher.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, Siggraph 201

Investigation of Image Enhancement Techniques for Advancing Colon Cancer Diagnosis

Colorectal cancer continues to pose a substantial worldwide health challenge, necessitating the development of advanced imaging techniques for early and accurate diagnosis. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid image enhancement approach that combines Total Variation (TV) regularization and shift-invariant filtering to improve the visibility and diagnostic quality of colon cancer images. The Total Variation regularization technique is employed to effectively reduce noise and enhance the edges in the input images, thereby preserving important structural details. Simultaneously, shift-invariant filtering is utilized to address spatial variations and artifacts that often arise in medical images, ensuring consistent and reliable enhancements across the entire image. Our hybrid approach synergistically integrates the strengths of both TV regularization and shift-invariant filtering, resulting in enhanced colon cancer images that offer improved contrast, reduced noise, and enhanced fine structures. This improved image quality aids medical professionals in better identifying and characterizing cancerous lesions, ultimately leading to more accurate and timely diagnoses. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conducted extensive experimentations on a diverse dataset of colon cancer images. Quantitative and qualitative assessments demonstrate that our hybrid approach outperforms existing enhancement methods, leading to superior image quality and diagnostic accuracy. In conclusion, the hybrid image enhancement approach presented in this study offers a promising solution for enhancing colon cancer images, contributing to the early detection and effective management of this life-threatening disease. These advancements hold significant potential for improving patient outcomes and reducing the burden of colon cancer on healthcare systems worldwide

A preliminary approach to intelligent x-ray imaging for baggage inspection at airports

Identifying explosives in baggage at airports relies on being able to characterize the materials that make up an X-ray image. If a suspicion is generated during the imaging process (step 1), the image data could be enhanced by adapting the scanning parameters (step 2). This paper addresses the first part of this problem and uses textural signatures to recognize and characterize materials and hence enabling system control. Directional Gabor-type filtering was applied to a series of different X-ray images. Images were processed in such a way as to simulate a line scanning geometry. Based on our experiments with images of industrial standards and our own samples it was found that different materials could be characterized in terms of the frequency range and orientation of the filters. It was also found that the signal strength generated by the filters could be used as an indicator of visibility and optimum imaging conditions predicted

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