Development and implementation of image fusion algorithms based on wavelets

Image fusion is a process of blending the complementary as well as the common features of a set of images, to generate a resultant image with superior information content in terms of subjective as well as objective analysis point of view. The objective of this research work is to develop some novel image fusion algorithms and their applications in various fields such as crack detection, multi spectra sensor image fusion, medical image fusion and edge detection of multi-focus images etc. The first part of this research work deals with a novel crack detection technique based on Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) for cracks in walls suppressing the diversity and complexity of wall images. It follows different edge tracking algorithms such as Hyperbolic Tangent (HBT) filtering and canny edge detection algorithm. The second part of this research work deals with a novel edge detection approach for multi-focused images by means of complex wavelets based image fusion. An illumination invariant hyperbolic tangent filter (HBT) is applied followed by an adaptive thresholding to get the real edges. The shift invariance and directionally selective diagonal filtering as well as the ease of implementation of Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT) ensure robust sub band fusion. It helps in avoiding the ringing artefacts that are more pronounced in Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The fusion using DT-CWT also solves the problem of low contrast and blocking effects. In the third part, an improved DT-CWT based image fusion technique has been developed to compose a resultant image with better perceptual as well as quantitative image quality indices. A bilateral sharpness based weighting scheme has been implemented for the high frequency coefficients taking both gradient and its phase coherence in accoun

Multi-resolution Active Models for Image Segmentation

Image segmentation refers to the process of subdividing an image into a set of non-overlapping regions. Image segmentation is a critical and essential step to almost all higher level image processing and pattern recognition approaches, where a good segmentation relieves higher level applications from considering irrelevant and noise data in the image. Image segmentation is also considered as the most challenging image processing step due to several reasons including spatial discontinuity of the region of interest and the absence of a universally accepted criteria for image segmentation. Among the huge number of segmentation approaches, active contour models or simply snakes receive a great attention in the literature. Where the contour/boundary of the region of interest is defined as the set of pixels at which the active contour reaches its equilibrium state. In general, two forces control the movement of the snake inside the image, internal force that prevents the snake from stretching and bending and external force that pulls the snake towards the desired object boundaries. One main limitation of active contour models is their sensitivity to image noise. Specifically, noise sensitivity leads the active contour to fail to properly converge, getting caught on spurious image features, preventing the iterative solver from taking large steps towards the final contour. Additionally, active contour initialization forms another type of limitation. Where, especially in noisy images, the active contour needs to be initialized relatively close to the object of interest, otherwise the active contour will be pulled by other non-real/spurious image features. This dissertation, aiming to improve the active model-based segmentation, introduces two models for building up the external force of the active contour. The first model builds up a scale-based-weighted gradient map from all resolutions of the undecimated wavelet transform, with preference given to coarse gradients over fine gradients. The undecimated wavelet transform, due to its near shift-invariance and the absence of down-sampling properties, produces well-localized gradient maps at all resolutions of the transform. Hence, the proposed final weighted gradient map is able to better drive the snake towards its final equilibrium state. Unlike other multiscale active contour algorithms that define a snake at each level of the hierarchy, our model defines a single snake with the external force field is simultaneously built based on gradient maps from all scales. The second model proposes the incorporation of the directional information, revealed by the dual tree complex wavelet transform (DT CWT), into the external force field of the active contour. At each resolution of the transform, a steerable set of convolution kernels is created and used for external force generation. In the proposed model, the size and the orientation of the kernels depend on the scale of the DT CWT and the local orientation statistics of each pixel. Experimental results using nature, synthetic and Optical Coherent Tomography (OCT) images reflect the superiority of the proposed models over the classical and the state-of-the-art models

Wavelet-Based Enhancement Technique for Visibility Improvement of Digital Images

Image enhancement techniques for visibility improvement of color digital images based on wavelet transform domain are investigated in this dissertation research. In this research, a novel, fast and robust wavelet-based dynamic range compression and local contrast enhancement (WDRC) algorithm to improve the visibility of digital images captured under non-uniform lighting conditions has been developed. A wavelet transform is mainly used for dimensionality reduction such that a dynamic range compression with local contrast enhancement algorithm is applied only to the approximation coefficients which are obtained by low-pass filtering and down-sampling the original intensity image. The normalized approximation coefficients are transformed using a hyperbolic sine curve and the contrast enhancement is realized by tuning the magnitude of the each coefficient with respect to surrounding coefficients. The transformed coefficients are then de-normalized to their original range. The detail coefficients are also modified to prevent edge deformation. The inverse wavelet transform is carried out resulting in a lower dynamic range and contrast enhanced intensity image. A color restoration process based on the relationship between spectral bands and the luminance of the original image is applied to convert the enhanced intensity image back to a color image. Although the colors of the enhanced images produced by the proposed algorithm are consistent with the colors of the original image, the proposed algorithm fails to produce color constant results for some pathological scenes that have very strong spectral characteristics in a single band. The linear color restoration process is the main reason for this drawback. Hence, a different approach is required for tackling the color constancy problem. The illuminant is modeled having an effect on the image histogram as a linear shift and adjust the image histogram to discount the illuminant. The WDRC algorithm is then applied with a slight modification, i.e. instead of using a linear color restoration, a non-linear color restoration process employing the spectral context relationships of the original image is applied. The proposed technique solves the color constancy issue and the overall enhancement algorithm provides attractive results improving visibility even for scenes with near-zero visibility conditions. In this research, a new wavelet-based image interpolation technique that can be used for improving the visibility of tiny features in an image is presented. In wavelet domain interpolation techniques, the input image is usually treated as the low-pass filtered subbands of an unknown wavelet-transformed high-resolution (HR) image, and then the unknown high-resolution image is produced by estimating the wavelet coefficients of the high-pass filtered subbands. The same approach is used to obtain an initial estimate of the high-resolution image by zero filling the high-pass filtered subbands. Detail coefficients are estimated via feeding this initial estimate to an undecimated wavelet transform (UWT). Taking an inverse transform after replacing the approximation coefficients of the UWT with initially estimated HR image, results in the final interpolated image. Experimental results of the proposed algorithms proved their superiority over the state-of-the-art enhancement and interpolation techniques

Multisensor Concealed Weapon Detection Using the Image Fusion Approach

Detection of concealed weapons is an increasingly important problem for both military and police since global terrorism and crime have grown as threats over the years. This work presents two image fusion algorithms, one at pixel level and another at feature level, for efficient concealed weapon detection application. Both the algorithms presented in this work are based on the double-density dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DDDTCWT). In the pixel level fusion scheme, the fusion of low frequency band coefficients is determined by the local contrast, while the high frequency band fusion rule is developed with consideration of both texture feature of the human visual system (HVS) and local energy basis. In the feature level fusion algorithm, features are exacted using Gaussian Mixture model (GMM) based multiscale segmentation approach and the fusion rules are developed based on region activity measurement. Experiment results demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms

Fixation Prediction and Visual Priority Maps for Biped Locomotion

© 2017 IEEE. This paper presents an analysis of the low-level features and key spatial points used by humans during locomotion over diverse types of terrain. Although, a number of methods for creating saliency maps and task-dependent approaches have been proposed to estimate the areas of an image that attract human attention, none of these can straightforwardly be applied to sequences captured during locomotion, which contain dynamic content derived from a moving viewpoint. We used a novel learning-based method for creating a visual priority map informed by human eye tracking data. Our proposed priority map is created based on two fixation types: first exploiting the observation that humans search for safe foot placement and second that they observe the edges of a path as a guide to safe traversal of the terrain. Texture features and the difference between them, observed at the region around an eye position, are employed within a support vector machine to create a visual priority map for biped locomotion. The results show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art, particularly for more complex terrains, where achieving smooth locomotion needs more attention on the traversing path

Directional edge and texture representations for image processing

An efficient representation for natural images is of fundamental importance in image processing and analysis. The commonly used separable transforms such as wavelets axe not best suited for images due to their inability to exploit directional regularities such as edges and oriented textural patterns; while most of the recently proposed directional schemes cannot represent these two types of features in a unified transform. This thesis focuses on the development of directional representations for images which can capture both edges and textures in a multiresolution manner. The thesis first considers the problem of extracting linear features with the multiresolution Fourier transform (MFT). Based on a previous MFT-based linear feature model, the work extends the extraction method into the situation when the image is corrupted by noise. The problem is tackled by the combination of a "Signal+Noise" frequency model, a refinement stage and a robust classification scheme. As a result, the MFT is able to perform linear feature analysis on noisy images on which previous methods failed. A new set of transforms called the multiscale polar cosine transforms (MPCT) are also proposed in order to represent textures. The MPCT can be regarded as real-valued MFT with similar basis functions of oriented sinusoids. It is shown that the transform can represent textural patches more efficiently than the conventional Fourier basis. With a directional best cosine basis, the MPCT packet (MPCPT) is shown to be an efficient representation for edges and textures, despite its high computational burden. The problem of representing edges and textures in a fixed transform with less complexity is then considered. This is achieved by applying a Gaussian frequency filter, which matches the disperson of the magnitude spectrum, on the local MFT coefficients. This is particularly effective in denoising natural images, due to its ability to preserve both types of feature. Further improvements can be made by employing the information given by the linear feature extraction process in the filter's configuration. The denoising results compare favourably against other state-of-the-art directional representations

Signal processing algorithms for enhanced image fusion performance and assessment

The dissertation presents several signal processing algorithms for image fusion in noisy multimodal conditions. It introduces a novel image fusion method which performs well for image sets heavily corrupted by noise. As opposed to current image fusion schemes, the method has no requirements for a priori knowledge of the noise component. The image is decomposed with Chebyshev polynomials (CP) being used as basis functions to perform fusion at feature level. The properties of CP, namely fast convergence and smooth approximation, renders it ideal for heuristic and indiscriminate denoising fusion tasks. Quantitative evaluation using objective fusion assessment methods show favourable performance of the proposed scheme compared to previous efforts on image fusion, notably in heavily corrupted images. The approach is further improved by incorporating the advantages of CP with a state-of-the-art fusion technique named independent component analysis (ICA), for joint-fusion processing based on region saliency. Whilst CP fusion is robust under severe noise conditions, it is prone to eliminating high frequency information of the images involved, thereby limiting image sharpness. Fusion using ICA, on the other hand, performs well in transferring edges and other salient features of the input images into the composite output. The combination of both methods, coupled with several mathematical morphological operations in an algorithm fusion framework, is considered a viable solution. Again, according to the quantitative metrics the results of our proposed approach are very encouraging as far as joint fusion and denoising are concerned. Another focus of this dissertation is on a novel metric for image fusion evaluation that is based on texture. The conservation of background textural details is considered important in many fusion applications as they help define the image depth and structure, which may prove crucial in many surveillance and remote sensing applications. Our work aims to evaluate the performance of image fusion algorithms based on their ability to retain textural details from the fusion process. This is done by utilising the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) model to extract second-order statistical features for the derivation of an image textural measure, which is then used to replace the edge-based calculations in an objective-based fusion metric. Performance evaluation on established fusion methods verifies that the proposed metric is viable, especially for multimodal scenarios