Aperture-scanning Fourier ptychography for 3D refocusing and super-resolution macroscopic imaging

We report an imaging scheme, termed aperture-scanning Fourier ptychography, for 3D refocusing and super-resolution macroscopic imaging. The reported scheme scans an aperture at the Fourier plane of an optical system and acquires the corresponding intensity images of the object. The acquired images are then synthesized in the frequency domain to recover a high-resolution complex sample wavefront; no phase information is needed in the recovery process. We demonstrate two applications of the reported scheme. In the first example, we use an aperture-scanning Fourier ptychography platform to recover the complex hologram of extended objects. The recovered hologram is then digitally propagated into different planes along the optical axis to examine the 3D structure of the object. We also demonstrate a reconstruction resolution better than the detector pixel limit (i.e., pixel super-resolution). In the second example, we develop a camera-scanning Fourier ptychography platform for super-resolution macroscopic imaging. By simply scanning the camera over different positions, we bypass the diffraction limit of the photographic lens and recover a super-resolution image of an object placed at the far field. This platform’s maximum achievable resolution is ultimately determined by the camera’s traveling range, not the aperture size of the lens. The FP scheme reported in this work may find applications in 3D object tracking, synthetic aperture imaging, remote sensing, and optical/electron/X-ray microscopy

Sparse representation-based SAR imaging

There is increasing interest in using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images in automated target recognition and decision-making tasks. The success of such tasks depends on how well the reconstructed SAR images exhibit certain features of the underlying scene. Based on the observation that typical underlying scenes usually exhibit sparsity in terms of such features, we develop an image formation method which formulates the SAR imaging problem as a sparse signal representation problem. Sparse signal representation, which has mostly been exploited in real-valued problems, has many capabilities such as superresolution and feature enhancement for various reconstruction and recognition tasks. However, for problems of complex-valued nature, such as SAR, a key challenge is how to choose the dictionary and the representation scheme for effective sparse representation. Since we are usually interested in features of the magnitude of the SAR reflectivity field, our new approach is designed to sparsely represent the magnitude of the complex-valued scattered field. This turns the image reconstruction problem into a joint optimization problem over the representation of magnitude and phase of the underlying field reflectivities. We develop the mathematical framework for this method and propose an iterative solution for the corresponding joint optimization problem. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of this method over previous approaches in terms of both producing high quality SAR images as well as exhibiting robustness to uncertain or limited data

Sparse representation-based synthetic aperture radar imaging

There is increasing interest in using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images in automated target recognition and decision-making tasks. The success of such tasks depends on how well the reconstructed SAR images exhibit certain features of the underlying scene. Based on the observation that typical underlying scenes usually exhibit sparsity in terms of such features, we develop an image formation method which formulates the SAR imaging problem as a sparse signal representation problem. Sparse signal representation, which has mostly been exploited in real-valued problems, has many capabilities such as superresolution and feature enhancement for various reconstruction and recognition tasks. However, for problems of complex-valued nature, such as SAR, a key challenge is how to choose the dictionary and the representation scheme for effective sparse representation. Since we are usually interested in features of the magnitude of the SAR reflectivity field, our new approach is designed to sparsely represent the magnitude of the complex-valued scattered field. This turns the image reconstruction problem into a joint optimization problem over the representation of magnitude and phase of the underlying field reflectivities. We develop the mathematical framework for this method and propose an iterative solution for the corresponding joint optimization problem. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of this method over previous approaches in terms of both producing high quality SAR images as well as exhibiting robustness to uncertain or limited data

Generalized Inpainting Method for Hyperspectral Image Acquisition

A recently designed hyperspectral imaging device enables multiplexed acquisition of an entire data volume in a single snapshot thanks to monolithically-integrated spectral filters. Such an agile imaging technique comes at the cost of a reduced spatial resolution and the need for a demosaicing procedure on its interleaved data. In this work, we address both issues and propose an approach inspired by recent developments in compressed sensing and analysis sparse models. We formulate our superresolution and demosaicing task as a 3-D generalized inpainting problem. Interestingly, the target spatial resolution can be adjusted for mitigating the compression level of our sensing. The reconstruction procedure uses a fast greedy method called Pseudo-inverse IHT. We also show on simulations that a random arrangement of the spectral filters on the sensor is preferable to regular mosaic layout as it improves the quality of the reconstruction. The efficiency of our technique is demonstrated through numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data as acquired by the snapshot imager.Comment: Keywords: Hyperspectral, inpainting, iterative hard thresholding, sparse models, CMOS, Fabry-P\'ero

A Multispectral Light Field Dataset and Framework for Light Field Deep Learning

Deep learning undoubtedly has had a huge impact on the computer vision community in recent years. In light field imaging, machine learning-based applications have significantly outperformed their conventional counterparts. Furthermore, multi- and hyperspectral light fields have shown promising results in light field-related applications such as disparity or shape estimation. Yet, a multispectral light field dataset, enabling data-driven approaches, is missing. Therefore, we propose a new synthetic multispectral light field dataset with depth and disparity ground truth. The dataset consists of a training, validation and test dataset, containing light fields of randomly generated scenes, as well as a challenge dataset rendered from hand-crafted scenes enabling detailed performance assessment. Additionally, we present a Python framework for light field deep learning. The goal of this framework is to ensure reproducibility of light field deep learning research and to provide a unified platform to accelerate the development of new architectures. The dataset is made available under dx.doi.org/10.21227/y90t-xk47 . The framework is maintained at gitlab.com/iiit-public/lfcnn

Remote sensing image fusion via compressive sensing

In this paper, we propose a compressive sensing-based method to pan-sharpen the low-resolution multispectral (LRM) data, with the help of high-resolution panchromatic (HRP) data. In order to successfully implement the compressive sensing theory in pan-sharpening, two requirements should be satisfied: (i) forming a comprehensive dictionary in which the estimated coefficient vectors are sparse; and (ii) there is no correlation between the constructed dictionary and the measurement matrix. To fulfill these, we propose two novel strategies. The first is to construct a dictionary that is trained with patches across different image scales. Patches at different scales or equivalently multiscale patches provide texture atoms without requiring any external database or any prior atoms. The redundancy of the dictionary is removed through K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD). Second, we design an iterative l1-l2 minimization algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to seek the sparse coefficient vectors. The proposed algorithm stacks missing high-resolution multispectral (HRM) data with the captured LRM data, so that the latter is used as a constraint for the estimation of the former during the process of seeking the representation coefficients. Three datasets are used to test the performance of the proposed method. A comparative study between the proposed method and several state-of-the-art ones shows its effectiveness in dealing with complex structures of remote sensing imagery

A convex formulation for hyperspectral image superresolution via subspace-based regularization

Hyperspectral remote sensing images (HSIs) usually have high spectral resolution and low spatial resolution. Conversely, multispectral images (MSIs) usually have low spectral and high spatial resolutions. The problem of inferring images which combine the high spectral and high spatial resolutions of HSIs and MSIs, respectively, is a data fusion problem that has been the focus of recent active research due to the increasing availability of HSIs and MSIs retrieved from the same geographical area. We formulate this problem as the minimization of a convex objective function containing two quadratic data-fitting terms and an edge-preserving regularizer. The data-fitting terms account for blur, different resolutions, and additive noise. The regularizer, a form of vector Total Variation, promotes piecewise-smooth solutions with discontinuities aligned across the hyperspectral bands. The downsampling operator accounting for the different spatial resolutions, the non-quadratic and non-smooth nature of the regularizer, and the very large size of the HSI to be estimated lead to a hard optimization problem. We deal with these difficulties by exploiting the fact that HSIs generally "live" in a low-dimensional subspace and by tailoring the Split Augmented Lagrangian Shrinkage Algorithm (SALSA), which is an instance of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), to this optimization problem, by means of a convenient variable splitting. The spatial blur and the spectral linear operators linked, respectively, with the HSI and MSI acquisition processes are also estimated, and we obtain an effective algorithm that outperforms the state-of-the-art, as illustrated in a series of experiments with simulated and real-life data.Comment: IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., to be publishe

Sketch-based subspace clustering of hyperspectral images

Sparse subspace clustering (SSC) techniques provide the state-of-the-art in clustering of hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, their computational complexity hinders their applicability to large-scale HSIs. In this paper, we propose a large-scale SSC-based method, which can effectively process large HSIs while also achieving improved clustering accuracy compared to the current SSC methods. We build our approach based on an emerging concept of sketched subspace clustering, which was to our knowledge not explored at all in hyperspectral imaging yet. Moreover, there are only scarce results on any large-scale SSC approaches for HSI. We show that a direct application of sketched SSC does not provide a satisfactory performance on HSIs but it does provide an excellent basis for an effective and elegant method that we build by extending this approach with a spatial prior and deriving the corresponding solver. In particular, a random matrix constructed by the Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform is first used to sketch the self-representation dictionary as a compact dictionary, which significantly reduces the number of sparse coefficients to be solved, thereby reducing the overall complexity. In order to alleviate the effect of noise and within-class spectral variations of HSIs, we employ a total variation constraint on the coefficient matrix, which accounts for the spatial dependencies among the neighbouring pixels. We derive an efficient solver for the resulting optimization problem, and we theoretically prove its convergence property under mild conditions. The experimental results on real HSIs show a notable improvement in comparison with the traditional SSC-based methods and the state-of-the-art methods for clustering of large-scale images