A Theoretically Guaranteed Deep Optimization Framework for Robust Compressive Sensing MRI

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most dynamic and safe imaging techniques available for clinical applications. However, the rather slow speed of MRI acquisitions limits the patient throughput and potential indi cations. Compressive Sensing (CS) has proven to be an efficient technique for accelerating MRI acquisition. The most widely used CS-MRI model, founded on the premise of reconstructing an image from an incompletely filled k-space, leads to an ill-posed inverse problem. In the past years, lots of efforts have been made to efficiently optimize the CS-MRI model. Inspired by deep learning techniques, some preliminary works have tried to incorporate deep architectures into CS-MRI process. Unfortunately, the convergence issues (due to the experience-based networks) and the robustness (i.e., lack real-world noise modeling) of these deeply trained optimization methods are still missing. In this work, we develop a new paradigm to integrate designed numerical solvers and the data-driven architectures for CS-MRI. By introducing an optimal condition checking mechanism, we can successfully prove the convergence of our established deep CS-MRI optimization scheme. Furthermore, we explicitly formulate the Rician noise distributions within our framework and obtain an extended CS-MRI network to handle the real-world nosies in the MRI process. Extensive experimental results verify that the proposed paradigm outperforms the existing state-of-the-art techniques both in reconstruction accuracy and efficiency as well as robustness to noises in real scene

Universal Approach to Overcoming Nonstationarity, Unsteadiness and Non-Markovity of Stochastic Processes in Complex Systems

In present paper we suggest a new universal approach to study complex systems by microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic methods. We discuss new possibilities of extracting information on nonstationarity, unsteadiness and non-Markovity of discrete stochastic processes in complex systems. We consider statistical properties of the fast, intermediate and slow components of the investigated processes in complex systems within the framework of microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic approaches separately. Among them theoretical analysis is carried out by means of local noisy time-dependent parameters and the conception of a quasi-Brownian particle (QBP) (mesoscopic approach) as well as the use of wavelet transformation of the initial row time series. As a concrete example we examine the seismic time series data for strong and weak earthquakes in Turkey ($1998,1999$) in detail, as well as technogenic explosions. We propose a new way of possible solution to the problem of forecasting strong earthquakes forecasting. Besides we have found out that an unexpected restoration of the first two local noisy parameters in weak earthquakes and technogenic explosions is determined by exponential law. In this paper we have also carried out the comparison and have discussed the received time dependence of the local parameters for various seismic phenomena

Image Restoration Using Joint Statistical Modeling in Space-Transform Domain

This paper presents a novel strategy for high-fidelity image restoration by characterizing both local smoothness and nonlocal self-similarity of natural images in a unified statistical manner. The main contributions are three-folds. First, from the perspective of image statistics, a joint statistical modeling (JSM) in an adaptive hybrid space-transform domain is established, which offers a powerful mechanism of combining local smoothness and nonlocal self-similarity simultaneously to ensure a more reliable and robust estimation. Second, a new form of minimization functional for solving image inverse problem is formulated using JSM under regularization-based framework. Finally, in order to make JSM tractable and robust, a new Split-Bregman based algorithm is developed to efficiently solve the above severely underdetermined inverse problem associated with theoretical proof of convergence. Extensive experiments on image inpainting, image deblurring and mixed Gaussian plus salt-and-pepper noise removal applications verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Comment: 14 pages, 18 figures, 7 Tables, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits System and Video Technology (TCSVT). High resolution pdf version and Code can be found at: http://idm.pku.edu.cn/staff/zhangjian/IRJSM

A Primal-Dual Proximal Algorithm for Sparse Template-Based Adaptive Filtering: Application to Seismic Multiple Removal

Unveiling meaningful geophysical information from seismic data requires to deal with both random and structured "noises". As their amplitude may be greater than signals of interest (primaries), additional prior information is especially important in performing efficient signal separation. We address here the problem of multiple reflections, caused by wave-field bouncing between layers. Since only approximate models of these phenomena are available, we propose a flexible framework for time-varying adaptive filtering of seismic signals, using sparse representations, based on inaccurate templates. We recast the joint estimation of adaptive filters and primaries in a new convex variational formulation. This approach allows us to incorporate plausible knowledge about noise statistics, data sparsity and slow filter variation in parsimony-promoting wavelet frames. The designed primal-dual algorithm solves a constrained minimization problem that alleviates standard regularization issues in finding hyperparameters. The approach demonstrates significantly good performance in low signal-to-noise ratio conditions, both for simulated and real field seismic data

Optimal Rates of Convergence for Noisy Sparse Phase Retrieval via Thresholded Wirtinger Flow

This paper considers the noisy sparse phase retrieval problem: recovering a sparse signal $x \in \mathbb{R}^p$ from noisy quadratic measurements $y_j = (a_j' x )^2 + \epsilon_j$, $j=1, \ldots, m$, with independent sub-exponential noise $\epsilon_j$. The goals are to understand the effect of the sparsity of $x$ on the estimation precision and to construct a computationally feasible estimator to achieve the optimal rates. Inspired by the Wirtinger Flow [12] proposed for noiseless and non-sparse phase retrieval, a novel thresholded gradient descent algorithm is proposed and it is shown to adaptively achieve the minimax optimal rates of convergence over a wide range of sparsity levels when the $a_j$'s are independent standard Gaussian random vectors, provided that the sample size is sufficiently large compared to the sparsity of $x$.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figure

Multi-Scale Edge Detection Algorithms and Their Information-Theoretic Analysis in the Context of Visual Communication

The unrealistic assumption that noise can be modeled as independent, additive and uniform can lead to problems when edge detection methods are applied to low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) images. The main reason for this is because the filter scale and the threshold for the gradient are difficult to determine at a regional or local scale when the noise estimate is on a global scale. Therefore, in this dissertation, we attempt to solve these problems by using more than one filter to detect the edges and discarding the global thresholding method in the edge discrimination. The proposed multi-scale edge detection algorithms utilize the multi-scale description to detect and localize edges. Furthermore, instead of using the single default global threshold, a local dynamic threshold is introduced to discriminate between edges and non-edges. The proposed algorithms also perform connectivity analysis on edge maps to ensure that small, disconnected edges are removed. Experiments where the methods are applied to a sequence of images of the same scene with different SNRs show the methods to be robust to noise. Additionally, a new noise reduction algorithm based on the multi-scale edge analysis is proposed. In general, an edge—high frequency information in an image—would be filtered or suppressed after image smoothing. With the help of multi-scale edge detection algorithms, the overall edge structure of the original image could be preserved when only the isolated edge information that represents noise gets filtered out. Experimental results show that this method is robust to high levels of noise, correctly preserving the edges. We also propose a new method for evaluating the performance of edge detection algorithms. It is based on information-theoretic analysis of the edge detection algorithms in the context of an end-to-end visual communication channel. We use the information between the scene and the output of the edge-detection algorithm, ala Shannon, to evaluate the performance. An edge detection algorithm is considered to have high performance only if the information rate from the scene to the edge approaches the maximum possible. Therefore, this information-theoretic analysis becomes a new method to allow comparison between different edge detection operators for a given end-to-end image processing system

Semi-blind Sparse Image Reconstruction with Application to MRFM

We propose a solution to the image deconvolution problem where the convolution kernel or point spread function (PSF) is assumed to be only partially known. Small perturbations generated from the model are exploited to produce a few principal components explaining the PSF uncertainty in a high dimensional space. Unlike recent developments on blind deconvolution of natural images, we assume the image is sparse in the pixel basis, a natural sparsity arising in magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM). Our approach adopts a Bayesian Metropolis-within-Gibbs sampling framework. The performance of our Bayesian semi-blind algorithm for sparse images is superior to previously proposed semi-blind algorithms such as the alternating minimization (AM) algorithm and blind algorithms developed for natural images. We illustrate our myopic algorithm on real MRFM tobacco virus data.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE Trans. Image Processing for possible publicatio