4 research outputs found

    Multiresolution image models and estimation techniques

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    Contourlet Domain Image Modeling and its Applications in Watermarking and Denoising

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    Statistical image modeling in sparse domain has recently attracted a great deal of research interest. Contourlet transform as a two-dimensional transform with multiscale and multi-directional properties is known to effectively capture the smooth contours and geometrical structures in images. The objective of this thesis is to study the statistical properties of the contourlet coefficients of images and develop statistically-based image denoising and watermarking schemes. Through an experimental investigation, it is first established that the distributions of the contourlet subband coefficients of natural images are significantly non-Gaussian with heavy-tails and they can be best described by the heavy-tailed statistical distributions, such as the alpha-stable family of distributions. It is shown that the univariate members of this family are capable of accurately fitting the marginal distributions of the empirical data and that the bivariate members can accurately characterize the inter-scale dependencies of the contourlet coefficients of an image. Based on the modeling results, a new method in image denoising in the contourlet domain is proposed. The Bayesian maximum a posteriori and minimum mean absolute error estimators are developed to determine the noise-free contourlet coefficients of grayscale and color images. Extensive experiments are conducted using a wide variety of images from a number of databases to evaluate the performance of the proposed image denoising scheme and to compare it with that of other existing schemes. It is shown that the proposed denoising scheme based on the alpha-stable distributions outperforms these other methods in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio and mean structural similarity index, as well as in terms of visual quality of the denoised images. The alpha-stable model is also used in developing new multiplicative watermark schemes for grayscale and color images. Closed-form expressions are derived for the log-likelihood-based multiplicative watermark detection algorithm for grayscale images using the univariate and bivariate Cauchy members of the alpha-stable family. A multiplicative multichannel watermark detector is also designed for color images using the multivariate Cauchy distribution. Simulation results demonstrate not only the effectiveness of the proposed image watermarking schemes in terms of the invisibility of the watermark, but also the superiority of the watermark detectors in providing detection rates higher than that of the state-of-the-art schemes even for the watermarked images undergone various kinds of attacks

    Robust Computer Vision Against Adversarial Examples and Domain Shifts

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    Recent advances in deep learning have achieved remarkable success in various computer vision problems. Driven by progressive computing resources and a vast amount of data, deep learning technology is reshaping human life. However, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been shown vulnerable to adversarial examples, in which carefully crafted perturbations can easily fool DNNs into making wrong predictions. On the other hand, DNNs have poor generalization to domain shifts, as they suffer from performance degradation when encountering data from new visual distributions. We view these issues from the perspective of robustness. More precisely, existing deep learning technology is not reliable enough for many scenarios, where adversarial examples and domain shifts are among the most critical. The lack of reliability inevitably limits DNNs from being deployed in more important computer vision applications, such as self-driving vehicles and medical instruments that have major safety concerns. To overcome these challenges, we focus on investigating and addressing the robustness of deep learning-based computer vision approaches. The first part of this thesis attempts to robustify computer vision models against adversarial examples. We dive into such adversarial robustness from four aspects: novel attacks for strengthening benchmarks, empirical defenses validated by a third-party evaluator, generalizable defenses that can defend against multiple and unforeseen attacks, and defenses specifically designed for less explored tasks. The second part of this thesis improves the robustness against domain shifts via domain adaptation. We dive into two important domain adaptation settings: unsupervised domain adaptation, which is the most common, and source-free domain adaptation, which is more practical in real-world scenarios. The last part explores the intersection of adversarial robustness and domain adaptation fields to provide new insights for robust DNNs. We study two directions: adversarial defense for domain adaptation and adversarial defense via domain adaptations. This dissertation aims at more robust, reliable, and trustworthy computer vision
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