Conditional toggle mappings: principles and applications

International audienceWe study a class of mathematical morphology filters to operate conditionally according to a set of pixels marked by a binary mask. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a general framework for several applications including edge enhancement and image denoising, when it is affected by salt-and-pepper noise. We achieve this goal by revisiting shock filters based on erosions and dilations and extending their definition to take into account the prior definition of a mask of pixels that should not be altered. New definitions for conditional erosions and dilations leading to the concept of conditional toggle mapping. We also investigate algebraic properties as well as the convergence of the associate shock filter. Experiments show how the selection of appropriate methods to generate the masks lead to either edge enhancement or salt-and-pepper denoising. A quantitative evaluation of the results demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Additionally, we analyse the application of conditional toggle mapping in remote sensing as pre-filtering for hierarchical segmentation

Generative adversarial networks review in earthquake-related engineering fields

Within seismology, geology, civil and structural engineering, deep learning (DL), especially via generative adversarial networks (GANs), represents an innovative, engaging, and advantageous way to generate reliable synthetic data that represent actual samples' characteristics, providing a handy data augmentation tool. Indeed, in many practical applications, obtaining a significant number of high-quality information is demanding. Data augmentation is generally based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning data-driven models. The DL GAN-based data augmentation approach for generating synthetic seismic signals revolutionized the current data augmentation paradigm. This study delivers a critical state-of-art review, explaining recent research into AI-based GAN synthetic generation of ground motion signals or seismic events, and also with a comprehensive insight into seismic-related geophysical studies. This study may be relevant, especially for the earth and planetary science, geology and seismology, oil and gas exploration, and on the other hand for assessing the seismic response of buildings and infrastructures, seismic detection tasks, and general structural and civil engineering applications. Furthermore, highlighting the strengths and limitations of the current studies on adversarial learning applied to seismology may help to guide research efforts in the next future toward the most promising directions

Recent Progress in Image Deblurring

This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image deblurring, including non-blind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, image deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods, homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also presented.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figure

Structure-aware image denoising, super-resolution, and enhancement methods

Denoising, super-resolution and structure enhancement are classical image processing applications. The motive behind their existence is to aid our visual analysis of raw digital images. Despite tremendous progress in these fields, certain difficult problems are still open to research. For example, denoising and super-resolution techniques which possess all the following properties, are very scarce: They must preserve critical structures like corners, should be robust to the type of noise distribution, avoid undesirable artefacts, and also be fast. The area of structure enhancement also has an unresolved issue: Very little efforts have been put into designing models that can tackle anisotropic deformations in the image acquisition process. In this thesis, we design novel methods in the form of partial differential equations, patch-based approaches and variational models to overcome the aforementioned obstacles. In most cases, our methods outperform the existing approaches in both quality and speed, despite being applicable to a broader range of practical situations.Entrauschen, Superresolution und Strukturverbesserung sind klassische Anwendungen der Bildverarbeitung. Ihre Existenz bedingt sich in dem Bestreben, die visuelle Begutachtung digitaler Bildrohdaten zu unterstützen. Trotz erheblicher Fortschritte in diesen Feldern bedürfen bestimmte schwierige Probleme noch weiterer Forschung. So sind beispielsweise Entrauschungsund Superresolutionsverfahren, welche alle der folgenden Eingenschaften besitzen, sehr selten: die Erhaltung wichtiger Strukturen wie Ecken, Robustheit bezüglich der Rauschverteilung, Vermeidung unerwünschter Artefakte und niedrige Laufzeit. Auch im Gebiet der Strukturverbesserung liegt ein ungelöstes Problem vor: Bisher wurde nur sehr wenig Forschungsaufwand in die Entwicklung von Modellen investieret, welche anisotrope Deformationen in bildgebenden Verfahren bewältigen können. In dieser Arbeit entwerfen wir neue Methoden in Form von partiellen Differentialgleichungen, patch-basierten Ansätzen und Variationsmodellen um die oben erwähnten Hindernisse zu überwinden. In den meisten Fällen übertreffen unsere Methoden nicht nur qualitativ die bisher verwendeten Ansätze, sondern lösen die gestellten Aufgaben auch schneller. Zudem decken wir mit unseren Modellen einen breiteren Bereich praktischer Fragestellungen ab

On the use of deep learning for phase recovery

Phase recovery (PR) refers to calculating the phase of the light field from its intensity measurements. As exemplified from quantitative phase imaging and coherent diffraction imaging to adaptive optics, PR is essential for reconstructing the refractive index distribution or topography of an object and correcting the aberration of an imaging system. In recent years, deep learning (DL), often implemented through deep neural networks, has provided unprecedented support for computational imaging, leading to more efficient solutions for various PR problems. In this review, we first briefly introduce conventional methods for PR. Then, we review how DL provides support for PR from the following three stages, namely, pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing. We also review how DL is used in phase image processing. Finally, we summarize the work in DL for PR and outlook on how to better use DL to improve the reliability and efficiency in PR. Furthermore, we present a live-updating resource (https://github.com/kqwang/phase-recovery) for readers to learn more about PR.Comment: 82 pages, 32 figure

Advanced Image Acquisition, Processing Techniques and Applications

"Advanced Image Acquisition, Processing Techniques and Applications" is the first book of a series that provides image processing principles and practical software implementation on a broad range of applications. The book integrates material from leading researchers on Applied Digital Image Acquisition and Processing. An important feature of the book is its emphasis on software tools and scientific computing in order to enhance results and arrive at problem solution

Decomposition Ascribed Synergistic Learning for Unified Image Restoration

Learning to restore multiple image degradations within a single model is quite beneficial for real-world applications. Nevertheless, existing works typically concentrate on regarding each degradation independently, while their relationship has been less exploited to ensure the synergistic learning. To this end, we revisit the diverse degradations through the lens of singular value decomposition, with the observation that the decomposed singular vectors and singular values naturally undertake the different types of degradation information, dividing various restoration tasks into two groups,\ie, singular vector dominated and singular value dominated. The above analysis renders a more unified perspective to ascribe the diverse degradations, compared to previous task-level independent learning. The dedicated optimization of degraded singular vectors and singular values inherently utilizes the potential relationship among diverse restoration tasks, attributing to the Decomposition Ascribed Synergistic Learning (DASL). Specifically, DASL comprises two effective operators, namely, Singular VEctor Operator (SVEO) and Singular VAlue Operator (SVAO), to favor the decomposed optimization, which can be lightly integrated into existing convolutional image restoration backbone. Moreover, the congruous decomposition loss has been devised for auxiliary. Extensive experiments on blended five image restoration tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, including image deraining, image dehazing, image denoising, image deblurring, and low-light image enhancement.Comment: 13 page

Information Extraction and Modeling from Remote Sensing Images: Application to the Enhancement of Digital Elevation Models

To deal with high complexity data such as remote sensing images presenting metric resolution over large areas, an innovative, fast and robust image processing system is presented. The modeling of increasing level of information is used to extract, represent and link image features to semantic content. The potential of the proposed techniques is demonstrated with an application to enhance and regularize digital elevation models based on information collected from RS images