Soft morphological filter optimization using a genetic algorithm for noise elimination

Digital image quality is of importance in almost all image processing applications. Many different approaches have been proposed for restoring the image quality depending on the nature of the degradation. One of the most common problems that cause such degradation is impulse noise. In general, well known median filters are preferred for eliminating different types of noise. Soft morphological filters are recently introduced and have been in use for many purposes. In this study, we present a Genetic Algorithm (GA) which combines different objectives as a weighted sum under a single evaluation function and generates a soft morphological filter to deal with impulse noise, after a training process with small images. The automatically generated filter performs better than the median filter and achieves comparable results to the best known filters from the literature over a set of benchmark instances that are larger than the training instances. Moreover, although the training process involves only impulse noise added images, the same evolved filter performs better than the median filter for eliminating Gaussian noise as well

Soft morphological filter optimization using a genetic algorithm for noise elimination

Digital image quality is of importance in almost all image processing applications. Many different approaches have been proposed for restoring the image quality depending on the nature of the degradation. One of the most common problems that cause such degradation is impulse noise. In general, well known median filters are preferred for eliminating different types of noise. Soft morphological filters are recently introduced and have been in use for many purposes. In this study, we present a Genetic Algorithm (GA) which combines different objectives as a weighted sum under a single evaluation function and generates a soft morphological filter to deal with impulse noise, after a training process with small images. The automatically generated filter performs better than the median filter and achieves comparable results to the best known filters from the literature over a set of benchmark instances that are larger than the training instances. Moreover, although the training process involves only impulse noise added images, the same evolved filter performs better than the median filter for eliminating Gaussian noise as well

Segmentation-assisted detection of dirt impairments in archived film sequences

A novel segmentation-assisted method for film dirt detection is proposed. We exploit the fact that film dirt manifests in the spatial domain as a cluster of connected pixels whose intensity differs substantially from that of its neighborhood and we employ a segmentation-based approach to identify this type of structure. A key feature of our approach is the computation of a measure of confidence attached to detected dirt regions which can be utilized for performance fine tuning. Another important feature of our algorithm is the avoidance of the computational complexity associated with motion estimation. Our experimental framework benefits from the availability of manually derived as well as objective ground truth data obtained using infrared scanning. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method compares favorably with standard spatial, temporal and multistage median filtering approaches and provides efficient and robust detection for a wide variety of test material

Word Representation Models for Morphologically Rich Languages in Neural Machine Translation

Dealing with the complex word forms in morphologically rich languages is an open problem in language processing, and is particularly important in translation. In contrast to most modern neural systems of translation, which discard the identity for rare words, in this paper we propose several architectures for learning word representations from character and morpheme level word decompositions. We incorporate these representations in a novel machine translation model which jointly learns word alignments and translations via a hard attention mechanism. Evaluating on translating from several morphologically rich languages into English, we show consistent improvements over strong baseline methods, of between 1 and 1.5 BLEU points

Sparse Coding Based Feature Representation Method for Remote Sensing Images

In this dissertation, we study sparse coding based feature representation method for the classification of multispectral and hyperspectral images (HSI). The existing feature representation systems based on the sparse signal model are computationally expensive, requiring to solve a convex optimization problem to learn a dictionary. A sparse coding feature representation framework for the classification of HSI is presented that alleviates the complexity of sparse coding through sub-band construction, dictionary learning, and encoding steps. In the framework, we construct the dictionary based upon the extracted sub-bands from the spectral representation of a pixel. In the encoding step, we utilize a soft threshold function to obtain sparse feature representations for HSI. Experimental results showed that a randomly selected dictionary could be as effective as a dictionary learned from optimization. The new representation usually has a very high dimensionality requiring a lot of computational resources. In addition, the spatial information of the HSI data has not been included in the representation. Thus, we modify the framework by incorporating the spatial information of the HSI pixels and reducing the dimension of the new sparse representations. The enhanced model, called sparse coding based dense feature representation (SC-DFR), is integrated with a linear support vector machine (SVM) and a composite kernels SVM (CKSVM) classifiers to discriminate different types of land cover. We evaluated the proposed algorithm on three well known HSI datasets and compared our method to four recently developed classification methods: SVM, CKSVM, simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit (SOMP) and image fusion and recursive filtering (IFRF). The results from the experiments showed that the proposed method can achieve better overall and average classification accuracies with a much more compact representation leading to more efficient sparse models for HSI classification. To further verify the power of the new feature representation method, we applied it to a pan-sharpened image to detect seafloor scars in shallow waters. Propeller scars are formed when boat propellers strike and break apart seagrass beds, resulting in habitat loss. We developed a robust identification system by incorporating morphological filters to detect and map the scars. Our results showed that the proposed method can be implemented on a regular basis to monitor changes in habitat characteristics of coastal waters

UNRAVELLING DIABETIC RETINOPATHY THROUGH IMAGE PROCESSING, NEURAL NETWORKS AND FUZZY LOGIC – A REVIEW

One of the main causes of blindness is diabetic retinopathy (DR) and it may affect people of any ages. In these days, both young and old ages are affected by diabetes, and the di abetes is the main cause of DR. Hence, it is necessary to have an automated system with good accuracy and less computation time to diagnose and treat DR, and the automated system can simplify the work of ophthalmologists. The objective is to present an overview of various works recently in detecting and segmenting the various lesions of DR. Papers were categorized based on the diagnosing tools and the methods used for detecting early and advanced stage lesions. The early lesions of DR are microaneurysms, hemorrhages, exudates, and cotton wool spots and in the advanced stage, new and fragile blood vessels can be grown. Results have been evaluated in terms of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and receiver operating characteristic curve. This paper analyzed the various steps and different algorithms used recently for the detection and classification of DR lesions. A comparison of performances has been made in terms of sensitivity, specificity, area under the curve, and accuracy. Suggestions, future workand the area to be improved were also discussed.Keywords: Diabetic retinopathy, Image processing, Morphological operations, Neural network, Fuzzy logic.Â

Image enhancement techniques applied to solar feature detection

This dissertation presents the development of automatic image enhancement techniques for solar feature detection. The new method allows for detection and tracking of the evolution of filaments in solar images. Series of H-alpha full-disk images are taken in regular time intervals to observe the changes of the solar disk features. In each picture, the solar chromosphere filaments are identified for further evolution examination. The initial preprocessing step involves local thresholding to convert grayscale images into black-and-white pictures with chromosphere granularity enhanced. An alternative preprocessing method, based on image normalization and global thresholding is presented. The next step employs morphological closing operations with multi-directional linear structuring elements to extract elongated shapes in the image. After logical union of directional filtering results, the remaining noise is removed from the final outcome using morphological dilation and erosion with a circular structuring element. Experimental results show that the developed techniques can achieve excellent results in detecting large filaments and good detection rates for small filaments. The final chapter discusses proposed directions of the future research and applications to other areas of solar image processing, in particular to detection of solar flares, plages and sunspots