Image fusion techniqes for remote sensing applications

Image fusion refers to the acquisition, processing and synergistic combination of information provided by various sensors or by the same sensor in many measuring contexts. The aim of this survey paper is to describe three typical applications of data fusion in remote sensing. The first study case considers the problem of the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry, where a pair of antennas are used to obtain an elevation map of the observed scene; the second one refers to the fusion of multisensor and multitemporal (Landsat Thematic Mapper and SAR) images of the same site acquired at different times, by using neural networks; the third one presents a processor to fuse multifrequency, multipolarization and mutiresolution SAR images, based on wavelet transform and multiscale Kalman filter. Each study case presents also results achieved by the proposed techniques applied to real data

Directional edge and texture representations for image processing

An efficient representation for natural images is of fundamental importance in image processing and analysis. The commonly used separable transforms such as wavelets axe not best suited for images due to their inability to exploit directional regularities such as edges and oriented textural patterns; while most of the recently proposed directional schemes cannot represent these two types of features in a unified transform. This thesis focuses on the development of directional representations for images which can capture both edges and textures in a multiresolution manner. The thesis first considers the problem of extracting linear features with the multiresolution Fourier transform (MFT). Based on a previous MFT-based linear feature model, the work extends the extraction method into the situation when the image is corrupted by noise. The problem is tackled by the combination of a "Signal+Noise" frequency model, a refinement stage and a robust classification scheme. As a result, the MFT is able to perform linear feature analysis on noisy images on which previous methods failed. A new set of transforms called the multiscale polar cosine transforms (MPCT) are also proposed in order to represent textures. The MPCT can be regarded as real-valued MFT with similar basis functions of oriented sinusoids. It is shown that the transform can represent textural patches more efficiently than the conventional Fourier basis. With a directional best cosine basis, the MPCT packet (MPCPT) is shown to be an efficient representation for edges and textures, despite its high computational burden. The problem of representing edges and textures in a fixed transform with less complexity is then considered. This is achieved by applying a Gaussian frequency filter, which matches the disperson of the magnitude spectrum, on the local MFT coefficients. This is particularly effective in denoising natural images, due to its ability to preserve both types of feature. Further improvements can be made by employing the information given by the linear feature extraction process in the filter's configuration. The denoising results compare favourably against other state-of-the-art directional representations

Particle detection and tracking in fluorescence time-lapse imaging: a contrario approach

This paper proposes a probabilistic approach for the detection and the tracking of particles in fluorescent time-lapse imaging. In the presence of a very noised and poor-quality data, particles and trajectories can be characterized by an a contrario model, that estimates the probability of observing the structures of interest in random data. This approach, first introduced in the modeling of human visual perception and then successfully applied in many image processing tasks, leads to algorithms that neither require a previous learning stage, nor a tedious parameter tuning and are very robust to noise. Comparative evaluations against a well-established baseline show that the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art.Comment: Published in Journal of Machine Vision and Application

Blind Curvelet based Denoising of Seismic Surveys in Coherent and Incoherent Noise Environments

The localized nature of curvelet functions, together with their frequency and dip characteristics, makes the curvelet transform an excellent choice for processing seismic data. In this work, a denoising method is proposed based on a combination of the curvelet transform and a whitening filter along with procedure for noise variance estimation. The whitening filter is added to get the best performance of the curvelet transform under coherent and incoherent correlated noise cases, and furthermore, it simplifies the noise estimation method and makes it easy to use the standard threshold methodology without digging into the curvelet domain. The proposed method is tested on pseudo-synthetic data by adding noise to real noise-less data set of the Netherlands offshore F3 block and on the field data set from east Texas, USA, containing ground roll noise. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve the best results under all types of noises (incoherent or uncorrelated or random, and coherent noise)

Video Compressive Sensing for Dynamic MRI

We present a video compressive sensing framework, termed kt-CSLDS, to accelerate the image acquisition process of dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We are inspired by a state-of-the-art model for video compressive sensing that utilizes a linear dynamical system (LDS) to model the motion manifold. Given compressive measurements, the state sequence of an LDS can be first estimated using system identification techniques. We then reconstruct the observation matrix using a joint structured sparsity assumption. In particular, we minimize an objective function with a mixture of wavelet sparsity and joint sparsity within the observation matrix. We derive an efficient convex optimization algorithm through alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and provide a theoretical guarantee for global convergence. We demonstrate the performance of our approach for video compressive sensing, in terms of reconstruction accuracy. We also investigate the impact of various sampling strategies. We apply this framework to accelerate the acquisition process of dynamic MRI and show it achieves the best reconstruction accuracy with the least computational time compared with existing algorithms in the literature.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figure

State Estimation for diffusion systems using a Karhunen-Loeve-Galerkin Reduced-Order Model

This thesis focuses on generating a continuous estimate of state using a small number of sensors for a process modeled by the diffusion partial differential equation(PDE). In biological systems the diffusion of oxygen in tissue is well described by the diffusion equation, also known by biologists as Fick\u27s first law. Mass transport of many other materials in biological systems are modeled by the diffusion PDE such as CO2, cell signaling factors, glucose and other biomolecules. Estimating the state of a PDE is more formidable than that of a system described by ordinary differential equations (ODEs). While the state variables of the ODE system are finite in number, the state variables of the PDE are distributed in the spatial domain and infinite in number. Reduction of the number of state variables to a finite small number which is tractable for estimation will be accomplished through use of the Karhunen-Loeve-Galerkin method for model order reduction. The model order reduction is broken into two steps, (i) determine an appropriate set of basis functions and (ii) project the PDE onto the set of candidate basis functions. The Karhunen-Loeve expansion is used to decompose a set of observations of the system into the principle modes composing the system dynamics. The observations may be obtained through numerical simulation or physical experiments that encompass all dynamics that the reduced-order model will be expected to reproduce. The PDE is then projected onto a small number of basis functions using the linear Galerkin method, giving a small set of ODEs which describe the system dynamics. The reduced-order model obtained from the Karhunen-Loeve-Galerkin procedure is then used with a Kalman filter to estimate the system state. Performance of the state estimator will be investigated using several numerical experiments. Fidelity of the reduced-order model for several different numbers of basis functions will be compared against a numerical solution considered to be the true solution of the continuous problem. The efficiency of the empirical basis compared to an analytical basis will be examined. The reduced-order model will then be used in a Kalman filter to estimate state for a noiseless system and then a noisy system. Effects of sensor placement and quantity are evaluated. A test platform was developed to study the estimation process to track state variables in a simple non-biological system. The platform allows the diffusion of dye through gelatin to be monitored with a camera. An estimate of dye concentration throughout the entire volume of gelatin will be accomplished using a small number of point sensors, i.e. pixels selected from the camera. The estimate is evaluated against the actual diffusion as captured by the camera. This test platform will provide a means to empirically study the dynamics of diffusion-reaction systems and associated state estimators

Likelihood calculation for a class of multiscale stochastic models, with application to texture discrimination

Caption title.Includes bibliographical references (p. 35-37).Supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. AFOSR-92-J-0002 Supported by the Office of Naval Research. N00014-91-J-1004 Supported by the Army Research Office. DAAL03-92-G-0115Mark R. Luettgen, Alan S. Willsky

Compressive Sensing Reconstruction for Video: An Adaptive Approach Based on Motion Estimation

This paper focuses on the problem of causally reconstructing Compressive Sensing (CS) captured video. The state-of-art causal approaches usually assume the signal support is static or changing sufficiently slowly over time, where Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is widely used as a motivating example. However, such an assumption is too restrictive for many other video applications, where the signal support changes rapidly. In this paper, we propose a framework that combines Motion Estimation (ME), the Kalman Filter (KF) and CS to adapt the reconstruction process to motions in the video so that the slowly-changing assumption on the signal support is relaxed and consequently is more suitable for video reconstruction. Explicit and implicit ME are designed to provide motion aware predictions, upon which a modified KF procedure is applied. Furthermore, three CS algorithms with embedded ME and KF are developed, and theoretical analyses are conducted via reconstruction error upper bounds, to characterize the various factors that affect reconstruction accuracy. Extensive simulations utilizing actual videos are carried out and the superiority of our methods is demonstrated.This work is supported by EPSRC Research Grant EP/K033700/1; the Natural Science Foundation of China (61401018, U1334202).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCSVT.2016.254007