Advances in Image Processing, Analysis and Recognition Technology

For many decades, researchers have been trying to make computers’ analysis of images as effective as the system of human vision is. For this purpose, many algorithms and systems have previously been created. The whole process covers various stages, including image processing, representation and recognition. The results of this work can be applied to many computer-assisted areas of everyday life. They improve particular activities and provide handy tools, which are sometimes only for entertainment, but quite often, they significantly increase our safety. In fact, the practical implementation of image processing algorithms is particularly wide. Moreover, the rapid growth of computational complexity and computer efficiency has allowed for the development of more sophisticated and effective algorithms and tools. Although significant progress has been made so far, many issues still remain, resulting in the need for the development of novel approaches

Visibility recovery on images acquired in attenuating media. Application to underwater, fog, and mammographic imaging

136 p.When acquired in attenuating media, digital images of ten suffer from a particularly complex degradation that reduces their visual quality, hindering their suitability for further computational applications, or simply decreasing the visual pleasan tness for the user. In these cases, mathematical image processing reveals it self as an ideal tool to recover some of the information lost during the degradation process. In this dissertation,we deal with three of such practical scenarios in which this problematic is specially relevant, namely, underwater image enhancement, fogremoval and mammographic image processing. In the case of digital mammograms,X-ray beams traverse human tissue, and electronic detectorscapture them as they reach the other side. However, the superposition on a bidimensional image of three-dimensional structures produces low contraste dimages in which structures of interest suffer from a diminished visibility, obstructing diagnosis tasks. Regarding fog removal, the loss of contrast is produced by the atmospheric conditions, and white colour takes over the scene uniformly as distance increases, also reducing visibility.For underwater images, there is an added difficulty, since colour is not lost uniformly; instead, red colours decay the fastest, and green and blue colours typically dominate the acquired images. To address all these challenges,in this dissertation we develop new methodologies that rely on: a)physical models of the observed degradation, and b) the calculus of variations.Equipped with this powerful machinery, we design novel theoreticaland computational tools, including image-dependent functional energies that capture the particularities of each degradation model. These energie sare composed of different integral terms that are simultaneous lyminimized by means of efficient numerical schemes, producing a clean,visually-pleasant and use ful output image, with better contrast and increased visibility. In every considered application, we provide comprehensive qualitative (visual) and quantitative experimental results to validateour methods, confirming that the developed techniques out perform other existing approaches in the literature

Advanced Image Acquisition, Processing Techniques and Applications

"Advanced Image Acquisition, Processing Techniques and Applications" is the first book of a series that provides image processing principles and practical software implementation on a broad range of applications. The book integrates material from leading researchers on Applied Digital Image Acquisition and Processing. An important feature of the book is its emphasis on software tools and scientific computing in order to enhance results and arrive at problem solution

Robust density modelling using the student's t-distribution for human action recognition

The extraction of human features from videos is often inaccurate and prone to outliers. Such outliers can severely affect density modelling when the Gaussian distribution is used as the model since it is highly sensitive to outliers. The Gaussian distribution is also often used as base component of graphical models for recognising human actions in the videos (hidden Markov model and others) and the presence of outliers can significantly affect the recognition accuracy. In contrast, the Student's t-distribution is more robust to outliers and can be exploited to improve the recognition rate in the presence of abnormal data. In this paper, we present an HMM which uses mixtures of t-distributions as observation probabilities and show how experiments over two well-known datasets (Weizmann, MuHAVi) reported a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. © 2011 IEEE

Reconstruction from Spatio-Spectrally Coded Multispectral Light Fields

In dieser Arbeit werden spektral kodierte multispektrale Lichtfelder untersucht, wie sie von einer Lichtfeldkamera mit einem spektral kodierten Mikrolinsenarray aufgenommen werden. Für die Rekonstruktion der kodierten Lichtfelder werden zwei Methoden entwickelt, eine basierend auf den Prinzipien des Compressed Sensing sowie eine Deep Learning Methode. Anhand neuartiger synthetischer und realer Datensätze werden die vorgeschlagenen Rekonstruktionsansätze im Detail evaluiert

Reconstruction from Spatio-Spectrally Coded Multispectral Light Fields

In this work, spatio-spectrally coded multispectral light fields, as taken by a light field camera with a spectrally coded microlens array, are investigated. For the reconstruction of the coded light fields, two methods, one based on the principles of compressed sensing and one deep learning approach, are developed. Using novel synthetic as well as a real-world datasets, the proposed reconstruction approaches are evaluated in detail

Reconstruction from Spatio-Spectrally Coded Multispectral Light Fields

In dieser Arbeit werden spektral codierte multispektrale Lichtfelder, wie sie von einer Lichtfeldkamera mit einem spektral codierten Mikrolinsenarray aufgenommen werden, untersucht. Für die Rekonstruktion der codierten Lichtfelder werden zwei Methoden entwickelt und im Detail ausgewertet. Zunächst wird eine vollständige Rekonstruktion des spektralen Lichtfelds entwickelt, die auf den Prinzipien des Compressed Sensing basiert. Um die spektralen Lichtfelder spärlich darzustellen, werden 5D-DCT-Basen sowie ein Ansatz zum Lernen eines Dictionary untersucht. Der konventionelle vektorisierte Dictionary-Lernansatz wird auf eine tensorielle Notation verallgemeinert, um das Lichtfeld-Dictionary tensoriell zu faktorisieren. Aufgrund der reduzierten Anzahl von zu lernenden Parametern ermöglicht dieser Ansatz größere effektive Atomgrößen. Zweitens wird eine auf Deep Learning basierende Rekonstruktion der spektralen Zentralansicht und der zugehörigen Disparitätskarte aus dem codierten Lichtfeld entwickelt. Dabei wird die gewünschte Information direkt aus den codierten Messungen geschätzt. Es werden verschiedene Strategien des entsprechenden Multi-Task-Trainings verglichen. Um die Qualität der Rekonstruktion weiter zu verbessern, wird eine neuartige Methode zur Einbeziehung von Hilfslossfunktionen auf der Grundlage ihrer jeweiligen normalisierten Gradientenähnlichkeit entwickelt und gezeigt, dass sie bisherige adaptive Methoden übertrifft. Um die verschiedenen Rekonstruktionsansätze zu trainieren und zu bewerten, werden zwei Datensätze erstellt. Zunächst wird ein großer synthetischer spektraler Lichtfelddatensatz mit verfügbarer Disparität Ground Truth unter Verwendung eines Raytracers erstellt. Dieser Datensatz, der etwa 100k spektrale Lichtfelder mit dazugehöriger Disparität enthält, wird in einen Trainings-, Validierungs- und Testdatensatz aufgeteilt. Um die Qualität weiter zu bewerten, werden sieben handgefertigte Szenen, so genannte Datensatz-Challenges, erstellt. Schließlich wird ein realer spektraler Lichtfelddatensatz mit einer speziell angefertigten spektralen Lichtfeldreferenzkamera aufgenommen. Die radiometrische und geometrische Kalibrierung der Kamera wird im Detail besprochen. Anhand der neuen Datensätze werden die vorgeschlagenen Rekonstruktionsansätze im Detail bewertet. Es werden verschiedene Codierungsmasken untersucht -- zufällige, reguläre, sowie Ende-zu-Ende optimierte Codierungsmasken, die mit einer neuartigen differenzierbaren fraktalen Generierung erzeugt werden. Darüber hinaus werden weitere Untersuchungen durchgeführt, zum Beispiel bezüglich der Abhängigkeit von Rauschen, der Winkelauflösung oder Tiefe. Insgesamt sind die Ergebnisse überzeugend und zeigen eine hohe Rekonstruktionsqualität. Die Deep-Learning-basierte Rekonstruktion, insbesondere wenn sie mit adaptiven Multitasking- und Hilfslossstrategien trainiert wird, übertrifft die Compressed-Sensing-basierte Rekonstruktion mit anschließender Disparitätsschätzung nach dem Stand der Technik

Reconstruction from Spatio-Spectrally Coded Multispectral Light Fields

In this work, spatio-spectrally coded multispectral light fields, as taken by a light field camera with a spectrally coded microlens array, are investigated. For the reconstruction of the coded light fields, two methods, one based on the principles of compressed sensing and one deep learning approach, are developed. Using novel synthetic as well as a real-world datasets, the proposed reconstruction approaches are evaluated in detail

Visibility Recovery on Images Acquired in Attenuating Media. Application to Underwater, Fog, and Mammographic Imaging

When acquired in attenuating media, digital images often suffer from a particularly complex degradation that reduces their visual quality, hindering their suitability for further computational applications, or simply decreasing the visual pleasantness for the user. In these cases, mathematical image processing reveals itself as an ideal tool to recover some of the information lost during the degradation process. In this dissertation, we deal with three of such practical scenarios in which this problematic is specially relevant, namely, underwater image enhancement, fog removal and mammographic image processing. In the case of digital mammograms, X-ray beams traverse human tissue, and electronic detectors capture them as they reach the other side. However, the superposition on a bidimensional image of three-dimensional structures produces lowcontrasted images in which structures of interest suffer from a diminished visibility, obstructing diagnosis tasks. Regarding fog removal, the loss of contrast is produced by the atmospheric conditions, and white colour takes over the scene uniformly as distance increases, also reducing visibility. For underwater images, there is an added difficulty, since colour is not lost uniformly; instead, red colours decay the fastest, and green and blue colours typically dominate the acquired images. To address all these challenges, in this dissertation we develop new methodologies that rely on: a) physical models of the observed degradation, and b) the calculus of variations. Equipped with this powerful machinery, we design novel theoretical and computational tools, including image-dependent functional energies that capture the particularities of each degradation model. These energies are composed of different integral terms that are simultaneously minimized by means of efficient numerical schemes, producing a clean, visually-pleasant and useful output image, with better contrast and increased visibility. In every considered application, we provide comprehensive qualitative (visual) and quantitative experimental results to validate our methods, confirming that the developed techniques outperform other existing approaches in the literature

Efficient Algorithms for Large-Scale Image Analysis

This work develops highly efficient algorithms for analyzing large images. Applications include object-based change detection and screening. The algorithms are 10-100 times as fast as existing software, sometimes even outperforming FGPA/GPU hardware, because they are designed to suit the computer architecture. This thesis describes the implementation details and the underlying algorithm engineering methodology, so that both may also be applied to other applications