Phase Retrieval with Application to Optical Imaging

This review article provides a contemporary overview of phase retrieval in optical imaging, linking the relevant optical physics to the information processing methods and algorithms. Its purpose is to describe the current state of the art in this area, identify challenges, and suggest vision and areas where signal processing methods can have a large impact on optical imaging and on the world of imaging at large, with applications in a variety of fields ranging from biology and chemistry to physics and engineering

Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)

The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th, 2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about 70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm": Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness; Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?; Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website: http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1

Estimation of Cerebral Physiology and Hemodynamics via Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a non-invasive optical imaging technique that has rapidly been gaining popularity for study of the brain. Near-infrared spectroscopy measures absorption of light, primarily due to hemoglobin, through an array of light sources and detectors that are coupled to the scalp. Measurements can generally be divided into measurements of baseline physiology (related to total absorption) and measurements of hemodynamic time-series data (related to relative absorption changes). Because light intensity drops off rapidly with depth, NIRS measurements are highly sensitive to extracerebral tissues. Attempts to recover baseline physiology measurements of the brain can be confounded by high sensitivity to the scalp and skull. Time-series measurements contain high contributions of systemic physiology signals, including cardiac, respiratory, and blood pressure waves. Furthermore, measurements over time inevitably introduce artifacts due to subject motion. The aim of this thesis was to develop improved analysis methods in the context of these NIRS specific confounding factors. The thesis consists of four articles that address specific issues in NIRS data analysis: (i) assessment of common data analysis procedures used to estimate oxygen saturation and hemoglobin content that assume a semi-infinite, homogeneous medium, (ii) testing the feasibility of improving oxygen saturation and hemoglobin measurements using multi-layered models, (iii) development of methods to estimate the general linear model for functional brain imaging that are robust to systemic physiology signals and motion artifacts, and (iv) the extension of (iii) to an adaptive method that is suitable for real-time analysis. Overall, this thesis helps to validate and advance analysis methods for NIRS

Regularization approaches to hyperspectral unmixing

We consider a few different approaches to hyperspectral unmixing of remotely sensed imagery which exploit and extend recent advances in sparse statistical regularization, handling of constraints and dictionary reduction. Hyperspectral unmixing methods often use a conventional least-squares based lasso which assumes that the data follows the Gaussian distribution, we use this as a starting point. In addition, we consider a robust approach to sparse spectral unmixing of remotely sensed imagery which reduces the sensitivity of the estimator to outliers. Due to water absorption and atmospheric effects that affect data collection, hyperspectral images are prone to have large outliers. The framework comprises of several well-principled penalties. A non-convex, hyper-Laplacian prior is incorporated to induce sparsity in the number of active pure spectral components, and total variation regularizer is included to exploit the spatial-contextual information of hyperspectral images. Enforcing the sum-to-one and non-negativity constraint on the models parameters is essential for obtaining realistic estimates. We consider two approaches to account for this: an iterative heuristic renormalization and projection onto the positive orthant, and a reparametrization of the coefficients which gives rise to a theoretically founded method. Since the large size of modern spectral libraries cannot only present computational challenges but also introduce collinearities between regressors, we introduce a library reduction step. This uses the multiple signal classi fication (MUSIC) array processing algorithm, which both speeds up unmixing and yields superior results in scenarios where the library size is extensive. We show that although these problems are non-convex, they can be solved by a properly de fined algorithm based on either trust region optimization or iteratively reweighted least squares. The performance of the different approaches is validated in several simulated and real hyperspectral data experiments

Sparse and Redundant Representations for Inverse Problems and Recognition

Sparse and redundant representation of data enables the description of signals as linear combinations of a few atoms from a dictionary. In this dissertation, we study applications of sparse and redundant representations in inverse problems and object recognition. Furthermore, we propose two novel imaging modalities based on the recently introduced theory of Compressed Sensing (CS). This dissertation consists of four major parts. In the first part of the dissertation, we study a new type of deconvolution algorithm that is based on estimating the image from a shearlet decomposition. Shearlets provide a multi-directional and multi-scale decomposition that has been mathematically shown to represent distributed discontinuities such as edges better than traditional wavelets. We develop a deconvolution algorithm that allows for the approximation inversion operator to be controlled on a multi-scale and multi-directional basis. Furthermore, we develop a method for the automatic determination of the threshold values for the noise shrinkage for each scale and direction without explicit knowledge of the noise variance using a generalized cross validation method. In the second part of the dissertation, we study a reconstruction method that recovers highly undersampled images assumed to have a sparse representation in a gradient domain by using partial measurement samples that are collected in the Fourier domain. Our method makes use of a robust generalized Poisson solver that greatly aids in achieving a significantly improved performance over similar proposed methods. We will demonstrate by experiments that this new technique is more flexible to work with either random or restricted sampling scenarios better than its competitors. In the third part of the dissertation, we introduce a novel Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging modality which can provide a high resolution map of the spatial distribution of targets and terrain using a significantly reduced number of needed transmitted and/or received electromagnetic waveforms. We demonstrate that this new imaging scheme, requires no new hardware components and allows the aperture to be compressed. Also, it presents many new applications and advantages which include strong resistance to countermesasures and interception, imaging much wider swaths and reduced on-board storage requirements. The last part of the dissertation deals with object recognition based on learning dictionaries for simultaneous sparse signal approximations and feature extraction. A dictionary is learned for each object class based on given training examples which minimize the representation error with a sparseness constraint. A novel test image is then projected onto the span of the atoms in each learned dictionary. The residual vectors along with the coefficients are then used for recognition. Applications to illumination robust face recognition and automatic target recognition are presented