Reconstructing polygons from moments with connections to array processing

Caption title.Includes bibliographical references (p. 24-26).Supported by the Office of Naval Research. N00014-91-J-1004 Supported by the US Army Research Office. DAAL03-92-G-0115 Supported by the National Science Foundation. MIP-9015281 Supported by the Clement Vaturi Fellowship in Biomedical Imaging Sciences at MIT.Peyman Milanfar ... [et al.]

On the shape-from-moments problem and recovering edges from noisy Radon data

We consider the problem of reconstructing a planar convex set from noisy observations of its moments. An estimation method based on pointwise recovering of the support function of the set is developed. We study intrinsic accuracy limitations in the shape-from-moments estimation problem by establishing a lower bound on the rate of convergence of the mean squared error. It is shown that the proposed estimator is near-optimal in the sense of the order. An application to tomographic reconstruction is discussed, and it is indicated how the proposed estimation method can be used for recovering edges from noisy Radon data

Multichannel sampling of finite rate of innovation signals

Recently there has been a surge of interest in sampling theory in signal processing community. New efficient sampling techniques have been developed that allow sampling and perfectly reconstructing some classes of non-bandlimited signals at sub-Nyquist rates. Depending on the setup used and reconstruction method involved, these schemes go under different names such as compressed sensing (CS), compressive sampling or sampling signals with finite rate of innovation (FRI). In this thesis we focus on the theory of sampling non-bandlimited signals with parametric structure or specifically signals with finite rate of innovation. Most of the theory on sampling FRI signals is based on a single acquisition device with one-dimensional (1-D) signals. In this thesis, we extend these results to the case of 2-D signals and multichannel acquisition systems. The essential issue in multichannel systems is that while each channel receives the input signal, it may introduce different unknown delays, gains or affine transformations which need to be estimated from the samples together with the signal itself. We pose both the calibration of the channels and the signal reconstruction stage as a parametric estimation problem and demonstrate that a simultaneous exact synchronization of the channels and reconstruction of the FRI signal is possible. Furthermore, because in practice perfect noise-free channels do not exist, we consider the case of noisy measurements and show that by considering Cramer-Rao bounds as well as numerical simulations, the multichannel systems are more resilient to noise than the single-channel ones. Finally, we consider the problem of system identification based on the multichannel and finite rate of innovation sampling techniques. First, by employing our multichannel sampling setup, we propose a novel algorithm for system identification problem with known input signal, that is for the case when both the input signal and the samples are known. Then we consider the problem of blind system identification and propose a novel algorithm for simultaneously estimating the input FRI signal and also the unknown system using an iterative algorithm

Feature Extraction for image super-resolution using finite rate of innovation principles

To understand a real-world scene from several multiview pictures, it is necessary to find the disparities existing between each pair of images so that they are correctly related to one another. This process, called image registration, requires the extraction of some specific information about the scene. This is achieved by taking features out of the acquired images. Thus, the quality of the registration depends largely on the accuracy of the extracted features. Feature extraction can be formulated as a sampling problem for which perfect re- construction of the desired features is wanted. The recent sampling theory for signals with finite rate of innovation (FRI) and the B-spline theory offer an appropriate new frame- work for the extraction of features in real images. This thesis first focuses on extending the sampling theory for FRI signals to a multichannel case and then presents exact sampling results for two different types of image features used for registration: moments and edges. In the first part, it is shown that the geometric moments of an observed scene can be retrieved exactly from sampled images and used as global features for registration. The second part describes how edges can also be retrieved perfectly from sampled images for registration purposes. The proposed feature extraction schemes therefore allow in theory the exact registration of images. Indeed, various simulations show that the proposed extraction/registration methods overcome traditional ones, especially at low-resolution. These characteristics make such feature extraction techniques very appropriate for applications like image super-resolution for which a very precise registration is needed. The quality of the super-resolved images obtained using the proposed feature extraction meth- ods is improved by comparison with other approaches. Finally, the notion of polyphase components is used to adapt the image acquisition model to the characteristics of real digital cameras in order to run super-resolution experiments on real images

On Sparse Representation in Fourier and Local Bases

We consider the classical problem of finding the sparse representation of a signal in a pair of bases. When both bases are orthogonal, it is known that the sparse representation is unique when the sparsity $K$ of the signal satisfies $K<1/\mu(D)$, where $\mu(D)$ is the mutual coherence of the dictionary. Furthermore, the sparse representation can be obtained in polynomial time by Basis Pursuit (BP), when $K<0.91/\mu(D)$. Therefore, there is a gap between the unicity condition and the one required to use the polynomial-complexity BP formulation. For the case of general dictionaries, it is also well known that finding the sparse representation under the only constraint of unicity is NP-hard. In this paper, we introduce, for the case of Fourier and canonical bases, a polynomial complexity algorithm that finds all the possible $K$-sparse representations of a signal under the weaker condition that $K<\sqrt{2} /\mu(D)$. Consequently, when $K<1/\mu(D)$, the proposed algorithm solves the unique sparse representation problem for this structured dictionary in polynomial time. We further show that the same method can be extended to many other pairs of bases, one of which must have local atoms. Examples include the union of Fourier and local Fourier bases, the union of discrete cosine transform and canonical bases, and the union of random Gaussian and canonical bases