Trajectory-Based Morphological Operators: A Model for Efficient Image Processing

Mathematical morphology has been an area of intensive research over the last few years. Although many remarkable advances have been achieved throughout these years, there is still a great interest in accelerating morphological operations in order for them to be implemented in real-time systems. In this work, we present a new model for computing mathematical morphology operations, the so-called morphological trajectory model (MTM), in which a morphological filter will be divided into a sequence of basic operations. Then, a trajectory-based morphological operation (such as dilation, and erosion) is defined as the set of points resulting from the ordered application of the instant basic operations. The MTM approach allows working with different structuring elements, such as disks, and from the experiments, it can be extracted that our method is independent of the structuring element size and can be easily applied to industrial systems and high-resolution images

Fast recursive grayscale morphology operators: from the algorithm to the pipeline architecture

International audienceThis paper presents a new algorithm for an efficient computation of morphological operations for gray images and its specific hardware. The method is based on a new recursive morphological decomposition method of 8-convex structuring elements by only causal two-pixel structuring elements (2PSE). Whatever the element size, erosion or/and dilation can then be performed during a unique raster-like image scan involving a fixed reduced analysis neighborhood. The resulting process offers low computation complexity combined with easy description of the element form. The dedicated hardware is generic and fully regular, built from elementary interconnected stages. It has been synthesized into an FPGA and achieves high frequency performances for any shape and size of structuring element

On morphological hierarchical representations for image processing and spatial data clustering

Hierarchical data representations in the context of classi cation and data clustering were put forward during the fties. Recently, hierarchical image representations have gained renewed interest for segmentation purposes. In this paper, we briefly survey fundamental results on hierarchical clustering and then detail recent paradigms developed for the hierarchical representation of images in the framework of mathematical morphology: constrained connectivity and ultrametric watersheds. Constrained connectivity can be viewed as a way to constrain an initial hierarchy in such a way that a set of desired constraints are satis ed. The framework of ultrametric watersheds provides a generic scheme for computing any hierarchical connected clustering, in particular when such a hierarchy is constrained. The suitability of this framework for solving practical problems is illustrated with applications in remote sensing

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

A Fusion Framework for Camouflaged Moving Foreground Detection in the Wavelet Domain

Detecting camouflaged moving foreground objects has been known to be difficult due to the similarity between the foreground objects and the background. Conventional methods cannot distinguish the foreground from background due to the small differences between them and thus suffer from under-detection of the camouflaged foreground objects. In this paper, we present a fusion framework to address this problem in the wavelet domain. We first show that the small differences in the image domain can be highlighted in certain wavelet bands. Then the likelihood of each wavelet coefficient being foreground is estimated by formulating foreground and background models for each wavelet band. The proposed framework effectively aggregates the likelihoods from different wavelet bands based on the characteristics of the wavelet transform. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly outperformed existing methods in detecting camouflaged foreground objects. Specifically, the average F-measure for the proposed algorithm was 0.87, compared to 0.71 to 0.8 for the other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by IEEE TI

Tracking granules on the Sun's surface and reconstructing horizontal velocity fields: I. the CST algorithm

Determination of horizontal velocity fields on the solar surface is crucial for understanding the dynamics of structures like mesogranulation or supergranulation or simply the distribution of magnetic fields. We pursue here the development of a method called CST for coherent structure tracking, which determines the horizontal motion of granules in the field of view. We first devise a generalization of Strous method for the segmentation of images and show that when segmentation follows the shape of granules more closely, granule tracking is less effective for large granules because of increased sensitivity to granule fragmentation. We then introduce the multi-resolution analysis on the velocity field, based on Daubechies wavelets, which provides a view of this field on different scales. An algorithm for computing the field derivatives, like the horizontal divergence and the vertical vorticity, is also devised. The effects from the lack of data or from terrestrial atmospheric distortion of the images are also briefly discussed.Comment: in press in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 9 page