Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)

The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th, 2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about 70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm": Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness; Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?; Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website: http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1

Image Deblurring and Super-resolution by Adaptive Sparse Domain Selection and Adaptive Regularization

As a powerful statistical image modeling technique, sparse representation has been successfully used in various image restoration applications. The success of sparse representation owes to the development of l1-norm optimization techniques, and the fact that natural images are intrinsically sparse in some domain. The image restoration quality largely depends on whether the employed sparse domain can represent well the underlying image. Considering that the contents can vary significantly across different images or different patches in a single image, we propose to learn various sets of bases from a pre-collected dataset of example image patches, and then for a given patch to be processed, one set of bases are adaptively selected to characterize the local sparse domain. We further introduce two adaptive regularization terms into the sparse representation framework. First, a set of autoregressive (AR) models are learned from the dataset of example image patches. The best fitted AR models to a given patch are adaptively selected to regularize the image local structures. Second, the image non-local self-similarity is introduced as another regularization term. In addition, the sparsity regularization parameter is adaptively estimated for better image restoration performance. Extensive experiments on image deblurring and super-resolution validate that by using adaptive sparse domain selection and adaptive regularization, the proposed method achieves much better results than many state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both PSNR and visual perception.Comment: 35 pages. This paper is under review in IEEE TI

A Joint Intensity and Depth Co-Sparse Analysis Model for Depth Map Super-Resolution

High-resolution depth maps can be inferred from low-resolution depth measurements and an additional high-resolution intensity image of the same scene. To that end, we introduce a bimodal co-sparse analysis model, which is able to capture the interdependency of registered intensity and depth information. This model is based on the assumption that the co-supports of corresponding bimodal image structures are aligned when computed by a suitable pair of analysis operators. No analytic form of such operators exist and we propose a method for learning them from a set of registered training signals. This learning process is done offline and returns a bimodal analysis operator that is universally applicable to natural scenes. We use this to exploit the bimodal co-sparse analysis model as a prior for solving inverse problems, which leads to an efficient algorithm for depth map super-resolution.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure