Improvements on stochastic vector quantization of images

A novel nonadaptive fixed-rate vector quantizer encoding scheme is presented, and preliminary results are shown. The design of the codebook has been based on a stochastic approach in order to match a previously defined model for the image to be encoded. Following this approach, the generation of the codebook is made extremely simple in terms of computational load. Good visual results are shown in the range of 0.5-0.8 bit/pixel. Much better performance is expected for adaptive schemes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Sparse Modeling for Image and Vision Processing

In recent years, a large amount of multi-disciplinary research has been conducted on sparse models and their applications. In statistics and machine learning, the sparsity principle is used to perform model selection---that is, automatically selecting a simple model among a large collection of them. In signal processing, sparse coding consists of representing data with linear combinations of a few dictionary elements. Subsequently, the corresponding tools have been widely adopted by several scientific communities such as neuroscience, bioinformatics, or computer vision. The goal of this monograph is to offer a self-contained view of sparse modeling for visual recognition and image processing. More specifically, we focus on applications where the dictionary is learned and adapted to data, yielding a compact representation that has been successful in various contexts.Comment: 205 pages, to appear in Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Visio

Neural Nearest Neighbors Networks

Non-local methods exploiting the self-similarity of natural signals have been well studied, for example in image analysis and restoration. Existing approaches, however, rely on k-nearest neighbors (KNN) matching in a fixed feature space. The main hurdle in optimizing this feature space w.r.t. application performance is the non-differentiability of the KNN selection rule. To overcome this, we propose a continuous deterministic relaxation of KNN selection that maintains differentiability w.r.t. pairwise distances, but retains the original KNN as the limit of a temperature parameter approaching zero. To exploit our relaxation, we propose the neural nearest neighbors block (N3 block), a novel non-local processing layer that leverages the principle of self-similarity and can be used as building block in modern neural network architectures. We show its effectiveness for the set reasoning task of correspondence classification as well as for image restoration, including image denoising and single image super-resolution, where we outperform strong convolutional neural network (CNN) baselines and recent non-local models that rely on KNN selection in hand-chosen features spaces.Comment: to appear at NIPS*2018, code available at https://github.com/visinf/n3net

Model-Based Edge Detector for Spectral Imagery Using Sparse Spatiospectral Masks

Two model-based algorithms for edge detection in spectral imagery are developed that specifically target capturing intrinsic features such as isoluminant edges that are characterized by a jump in color but not in intensity. Given prior knowledge of the classes of reflectance or emittance spectra associated with candidate objects in a scene, a small set of spectral-band ratios, which most profoundly identify the edge between each pair of materials, are selected to define a edge signature. The bands that form the edge signature are fed into a spatial mask, producing a sparse joint spatiospectral nonlinear operator. The first algorithm achieves edge detection for every material pair by matching the response of the operator at every pixel with the edge signature for the pair of materials. The second algorithm is a classifier-enhanced extension of the first algorithm that adaptively accentuates distinctive features before applying the spatiospectral operator. Both algorithms are extensively verified using spectral imagery from the airborne hyperspectral imager and from a dots-in-a-well midinfrared imager. In both cases, the multicolor gradient (MCG) and the hyperspectral/spatial detection of edges (HySPADE) edge detectors are used as a benchmark for comparison. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform the MCG and HySPADE edge detectors in accuracy, especially when isoluminant edges are present. By requiring only a few bands as input to the spatiospectral operator, the algorithms enable significant levels of data compression in band selection. In the presented examples, the required operations per pixel are reduced by a factor of 71 with respect to those required by the MCG edge detector