Implementation of Super Resolution Techniques in Geospatial Satellite Imagery

The potential for more precise land cover classifications and pattern analysis is provided by technological advancements and the growing accessibility of high-resolution satellite images, which might significantly improve the detection and quantification of land cover change for conservation.  A group of methods known as "super-resolution imaging" use generative modelling to increase the resolution of an imaging system. Super-Resolution Imaging, which falls under the category of sophisticated computer vision and image processing, has a variety of practical uses, including astronomical imaging, surveillance and security, medical imaging, and satellite imaging. As computer vision is where deep learning algorithms for super-resolution first appeared, they were mostly created on RGB images in 8-bit colour depth, where the sensor and camera are separated by a few meters. But no evaluation of these methods has been done

Robust Calibration of Cameras with Telephoto Lens Using Regularized Least Squares

Cameras with telephoto lens are usually used to recover details of an object that is either small or located far away from the cameras. However, the calibration of this kind of cameras is not as accurate as the one of cameras with short focal lengths that are commonly used in many vision applications. This paper has two contributions. First, we present a first-order error analysis that shows the relation between focal length and estimation uncertainties of camera parameters. To our knowledge, this error analysis with respect to focal length has not been studied in the area of camera calibration. Second, we propose a robust algorithm to calibrate the camera with a long focal length without using additional devices. By adding a regularization term, our algorithm makes the estimation of the image of the absolute conic well posed. As a consequence, the covariance of camera parameters can be reduced greatly. We further used simulations and real data to verify our proposed algorithm and obtained very stable results

An augmented Lagrangian method for total variation video restoration,”

Abstract-This paper presents a fast algorithm for restoring video sequences. The proposed algorithm, as opposed to existing methods, does not consider video restoration as a sequence of image restoration problems. Rather, it treats a video sequence as a space-time volume and poses a space-time total variation regularization to enhance the smoothness of the solution. The optimization problem is solved by transforming the original unconstrained minimization problem to an equivalent constrained minimization problem. An augmented Lagrangian method is used to handle the constraints, and an alternating direction method (ADM) is used to iteratively find solutions of the subproblems. The proposed algorithm has a wide range of applications, including video deblurring and denoising, video disparity refinement, and hot-air turbulence effect reduction

Robust Subspace Estimation Using Low-rank Optimization. Theory And Applications In Scene Reconstruction, Video Denoising, And Activity Recognition.

In this dissertation, we discuss the problem of robust linear subspace estimation using low-rank optimization and propose three formulations of it. We demonstrate how these formulations can be used to solve fundamental computer vision problems, and provide superior performance in terms of accuracy and running time. Consider a set of observations extracted from images (such as pixel gray values, local features, trajectories . . . etc). If the assumption that these observations are drawn from a liner subspace (or can be linearly approximated) is valid, then the goal is to represent each observation as a linear combination of a compact basis, while maintaining a minimal reconstruction error. One of the earliest, yet most popular, approaches to achieve that is Principal Component Analysis (PCA). However, PCA can only handle Gaussian noise, and thus suffers when the observations are contaminated with gross and sparse outliers. To this end, in this dissertation, we focus on estimating the subspace robustly using low-rank optimization, where the sparse outliers are detected and separated through the `1 norm. The robust estimation has a two-fold advantage: First, the obtained basis better represents the actual subspace because it does not include contributions from the outliers. Second, the detected outliers are often of a specific interest in many applications, as we will show throughout this thesis. We demonstrate four different formulations and applications for low-rank optimization. First, we consider the problem of reconstructing an underwater sequence by removing the iii turbulence caused by the water waves. The main drawback of most previous attempts to tackle this problem is that they heavily depend on modelling the waves, which in fact is ill-posed since the actual behavior of the waves along with the imaging process are complicated and include several noise components; therefore, their results are not satisfactory. In contrast, we propose a novel approach which outperforms the state-of-the-art. The intuition behind our method is that in a sequence where the water is static, the frames would be linearly correlated. Therefore, in the presence of water waves, we may consider the frames as noisy observations drawn from a the subspace of linearly correlated frames. However, the noise introduced by the water waves is not sparse, and thus cannot directly be detected using low-rank optimization. Therefore, we propose a data-driven two-stage approach, where the first stage “sparsifies” the noise, and the second stage detects it. The first stage leverages the temporal mean of the sequence to overcome the structured turbulence of the waves through an iterative registration algorithm. The result of the first stage is a high quality mean and a better structured sequence; however, the sequence still contains unstructured sparse noise. Thus, we employ a second stage at which we extract the sparse errors from the sequence through rank minimization. Our method converges faster, and drastically outperforms state of the art on all testing sequences. Secondly, we consider a closely related situation where an independently moving object is also present in the turbulent video. More precisely, we consider video sequences acquired in a desert battlefields, where atmospheric turbulence is typically present, in addition to independently moving targets. Typical approaches for turbulence mitigation follow averaging or de-warping techniques. Although these methods can reduce the turbulence, they distort the independently moving objects which can often be of great interest. Therefore, we address the iv problem of simultaneous turbulence mitigation and moving object detection. We propose a novel three-term low-rank matrix decomposition approach in which we decompose the turbulence sequence into three components: the background, the turbulence, and the object. We simplify this extremely difficult problem into a minimization of nuclear norm, Frobenius norm, and `1 norm. Our method is based on two observations: First, the turbulence causes dense and Gaussian noise, and therefore can be captured by Frobenius norm, while the moving objects are sparse and thus can be captured by `1 norm. Second, since the object’s motion is linear and intrinsically different than the Gaussian-like turbulence, a Gaussian-based turbulence model can be employed to enforce an additional constraint on the search space of the minimization. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach on challenging sequences which are significantly distorted with atmospheric turbulence and include extremely tiny moving objects. In addition to robustly detecting the subspace of the frames of a sequence, we consider using trajectories as observations in the low-rank optimization framework. In particular, in videos acquired by moving cameras, we track all the pixels in the video and use that to estimate the camera motion subspace. This is particularly useful in activity recognition, which typically requires standard preprocessing steps such as motion compensation, moving object detection, and object tracking. The errors from the motion compensation step propagate to the object detection stage, resulting in miss-detections, which further complicates the tracking stage, resulting in cluttered and incorrect tracks. In contrast, we propose a novel approach which does not follow the standard steps, and accordingly avoids the aforementioned diffi- culties. Our approach is based on Lagrangian particle trajectories which are a set of dense trajectories obtained by advecting optical flow over time, thus capturing the ensemble motions v of a scene. This is done in frames of unaligned video, and no object detection is required. In order to handle the moving camera, we decompose the trajectories into their camera-induced and object-induced components. Having obtained the relevant object motion trajectories, we compute a compact set of chaotic invariant features, which captures the characteristics of the trajectories. Consequently, a SVM is employed to learn and recognize the human actions using the computed motion features. We performed intensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, and obtained promising results. Finally, we consider a more challenging problem referred to as complex event recognition, where the activities of interest are complex and unconstrained. This problem typically pose significant challenges because it involves videos of highly variable content, noise, length, frame size . . . etc. In this extremely challenging task, high-level features have recently shown a promising direction as in [53, 129], where core low-level events referred to as concepts are annotated and modelled using a portion of the training data, then each event is described using its content of these concepts. However, because of the complex nature of the videos, both the concept models and the corresponding high-level features are significantly noisy. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel low-rank formulation, which combines the precisely annotated videos used to train the concepts, with the rich high-level features. Our approach finds a new representation for each event, which is not only low-rank, but also constrained to adhere to the concept annotation, thus suppressing the noise, and maintaining a consistent occurrence of the concepts in each event. Extensive experiments on large scale real world dataset TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection 2011 and 2012 demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the discriminativity of the high-level features by a significant margin

Unbiased risk estimate algorithms for image deconvolution.

本論文工作的主題是圖像反卷積問題。在很多實際應用，例如生物醫學成像，地震學，天文學，遙感和光學成像中，觀測數據經常會出現令人不愉快的退化現象，這種退化一般由模糊效應(例如光學衍射限條件)和噪聲汙染(比如光子計數噪聲和讀出噪聲)造成的，這兩者都是物理儀器自身的條件限制造成的。作為一個標准的線性反問題，圖像反卷積經常被用作恢複觀測到的模糊的有噪點的圖像。我們旨在基于無偏差風險估計准則研究新的反卷積算法。本論文工作主要分為以下兩大部分。首先，我們考慮在加性高斯白噪聲條件下的圖像非盲反卷積問題，即准確的點擴散函數已知。我們的研究准則是最小化均方誤差的無偏差估計，即SURE. SURE- LET方法最初被應用于圖像降噪問題。本論文工作擴展該方法至討論圖像反卷積問題.我們提出了一個新的SURE-LET算法，用于快速有效地實現圖像複原功能。具體而言，我們將反卷積過程參數化表示為有限個基本函數的線性組合，稱作LET方法。反卷積問題最終簡化為求解該線性組合的最優線性系數。由于SURE的二次項本質和線性參數化表示，求解線性系數可由求解線性方程組而得。實驗結果顯示該論文提出的方法在信噪比，圖像的視覺質量和運算時間等方面均優于其他迄今最優秀的算法。論文的第二部分討論圖像盲複原中的點擴散函數估計問題。我們提出了blur-SURE -一個均方誤差修正版的無偏差估計 - 作為點擴散函數估計的最新准則，即點擴散函數由最小化這個新的目標函數獲得。然後我們利用這個估計的點擴散函數，用第一部分所提出的SURE-LET算法進行圖像的非盲複原。我們以一些典型的點擴散函數形式(高斯函數最為典型)為例詳細闡述該blur-SURE理論框架。實驗結果顯示最小化blur-SURE能夠更准確的估計點擴散函數，從而獲得更加優越的反卷積佳能。相比于圖像非盲複原，盲複原所得的圖片的視覺質量損失可忽略不計。本論文所提出的基于無偏差估計的算法可擴展至其他噪聲模型。由于本論文以SURE基礎的方法在理論上並不僅限于卷積問題，該方法可用于解決數據的其他線性失真問題。The subject of this thesis is image deconvolution. In many real applications, e.g. biomedical imaging, seismology, astronomy, remote sensing and optical imaging, undesirable degradations by blurring effect (e.g. optical diffraction-limited condition) and noise corruption (e.g. photon-counting noise and readout noise) are inherent to any physical acquisition device. Image deconvolution, as a standard linear inverse problem, is often applied to recover the images from their blurred and noisy observations. Our interest lies in novel deconvolution algorithms based on unbiased risk estimate. This thesis is organized in two main parts as briefly summarized below.We first consider non-blind image deconvolution with the corruption of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), where the point spread function (PSF) is exactly known. Our driving principle is the minimization of an unbiased estimate of mean squared error (MSE) between observed and clean data, known as "Stein's unbiased risk estimate" (SURE). The SURE-LET approach, which was originally developed for denoising, is extended to the deconvolution problem: a new SURE-LET deconvolution algorithm for fast and efficient implementation is proposed. More specifically, we parametrize the deconvolution process as a linear combination of a small number of known basic processings, which we call the linear expansion of thresholds (LET), and then minimize the SURE over the unknown linear coefficients. Due to the quadratic nature of SURE and the linear parametrization, the optimal linear weights of the combination is finally achieved by solving a linear system of equations. Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, visual quality, as well as computation time.The second part of this thesis is concerned with PSF estimation for blind deconvolution. We propose a "blur-SURE" - an unbiased estimate of a filtered version of MSE - as a novel criterion for estimating the PSF, from the observed image only, i.e. the PSF is identified by minimizing this new objective functional, whose validity has been theoretically verified. The blur-SURE framework is exemplified with a number of parametric forms of the PSF, most typically, the Gaussian kernel. Experiments show that the blur-SURE minimization yields highly accurate estimate of PSF parameters. We then perform non-blind deconvolution using the SURE-LET algorithm proposed in Part I, with the estimated PSF. Experiments show that the estimated PSF results in superior deconvolution performance, with a negligible quality loss, compared to the deconvolution with the exact PSF.One may extend the algorithms based on unbiased risk estimate to other noise model. Since the SURE-based approaches does not restrict themselves to convolution operation, it is possible to extend them to other distortion scenarios.Detailed summary in vernacular field only.Detailed summary in vernacular field only.Detailed summary in vernacular field only.Detailed summary in vernacular field only.Xue, Feng.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-130).Abstracts also in Chinese.Dedication --- p.iAcknowledgments --- p.iiiAbstract --- p.ixList of Notations --- p.xiContents --- p.xviList of Figures --- p.xxList of Tables --- p.xxiiChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Motivations and objectives --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- Mathematical formulation for problem statement --- p.2Chapter 1.3 --- Survey of non-blind deconvolution approaches --- p.2Chapter 1.3.1 --- Regularization --- p.2Chapter 1.3.2 --- Regularized inversion followed by denoising --- p.4Chapter 1.3.3 --- Bayesian approach --- p.4Chapter 1.3.4 --- Remark --- p.5Chapter 1.4 --- Survey of blind deconvolution approaches --- p.5Chapter 1.4.1 --- Non-parametric blind deconvolution --- p.5Chapter 1.4.2 --- Parametric blind deconvolution --- p.7Chapter 1.5 --- Objective assessment of the deconvolution quality --- p.8Chapter 1.5.1 --- Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) --- p.8Chapter 1.5.2 --- Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) --- p.8Chapter 1.6 --- Thesis contributions --- p.9Chapter 1.6.1 --- Theoretical contributions --- p.9Chapter 1.6.2 --- Algorithmic contributions --- p.10Chapter 1.7 --- Organization --- p.11Chapter I --- The SURE-LET Approach to Non-blind Deconvolution --- p.13Chapter 2 --- The SURE-LET Framework for Deconvolution --- p.15Chapter 2.1 --- Motivations --- p.15Chapter 2.2 --- Related work --- p.15Chapter 2.3 --- Problem statement --- p.17Chapter 2.4 --- Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimate (SURE) for deconvolution --- p.17Chapter 2.4.1 --- Original SURE --- p.17Chapter 2.4.2 --- Regularized approximation of SURE --- p.18Chapter 2.5 --- The SURE-LET approach --- p.19Chapter 2.6 --- Summary --- p.20Chapter 3 --- Multi-Wiener SURE-LET Approach --- p.23Chapter 3.1 --- Problem statement --- p.23Chapter 3.2 --- Linear deconvolution: multi-Wiener filtering --- p.23Chapter 3.3 --- SURE-LET in orthonormal wavelet representation --- p.24Chapter 3.3.1 --- Mathematical formulation --- p.24Chapter 3.3.2 --- SURE minimization in orthonormal wavelet domain --- p.26Chapter 3.3.3 --- Computational issues --- p.27Chapter 3.4 --- SURE-LET approach for redundant wavelet representation --- p.30Chapter 3.5 --- Computational aspects --- p.32Chapter 3.5.1 --- Periodic boundary extensions --- p.33Chapter 3.5.2 --- Symmetric convolution --- p.36Chapter 3.5.3 --- Half-point symmetric boundary extensions --- p.36Chapter 3.5.4 --- Whole-point symmetric boundary extensions --- p.43Chapter 3.6 --- Results and discussions --- p.46Chapter 3.6.1 --- Experimental setting --- p.46Chapter 3.6.2 --- Influence of the number of Wiener lters --- p.47Chapter 3.6.3 --- Influence of the parameters on the deconvolution performance --- p.48Chapter 3.6.4 --- Influence of the boundary conditions: periodic vs symmetric --- p.52Chapter 3.6.5 --- Comparison with the state-of-the-art --- p.52Chapter 3.6.6 --- Analysis of computational complexity --- p.59Chapter 3.7 --- Conclusion --- p.60Chapter II --- The SURE-based Approach to Blind Deconvolution --- p.63Chapter 4 --- The Blur-SURE Framework to PSF Estimation --- p.65Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.65Chapter 4.2 --- Problem statement --- p.66Chapter 4.3 --- The blur-SURE framework for general linear model --- p.66Chapter 4.3.1 --- Blur-MSE: a modified version of MSE --- p.66Chapter 4.3.2 --- Blur-MSE minimization --- p.67Chapter 4.3.3 --- Blur-SURE: an unbiased estimate of the blur-MSE --- p.67Chapter 4.4 --- Application of blur-SURE framework for PSF estimation --- p.68Chapter 4.4.1 --- Problem statement in the context of convolution --- p.68Chapter 4.4.2 --- Blur-MSE minimization for PSF estimation --- p.69Chapter 4.4.3 --- Approximation of exact Wiener filtering --- p.70Chapter 4.4.4 --- Blur-SURE minimization for PSF estimation --- p.72Chapter 4.5 --- Concluding remarks --- p.72Chapter 5 --- The Blur-SURE Approach to Parametric PSF Estimation --- p.75Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.75Chapter 5.1.1 --- Overview of parametric PSF estimation --- p.75Chapter 5.1.2 --- Gaussian PSF as a typical example --- p.75Chapter 5.1.3 --- Outline of this chapter --- p.76Chapter 5.2 --- Parametric estimation: problem formulation --- p.77Chapter 5.3 --- Examples of PSF parameter estimation --- p.77Chapter 5.3.1 --- Gaussian kernel --- p.77Chapter 5.3.2 --- Non-Gaussian PSF with scaling factor s --- p.78Chapter 5.4 --- Minimization via the approximated function λ = λ (s) --- p.79Chapter 5.5 --- Results and discussions --- p.82Chapter 5.5.1 --- Experimental setting --- p.82Chapter 5.5.2 --- Non-Gaussian functions: estimation of scaling factor s --- p.83Chapter 5.5.3 --- Gaussian function: estimation of standard deviation s --- p.84Chapter 5.5.4 --- Comparison of deconvolution performance with the state-of-the-art --- p.84Chapter 5.5.5 --- Application to real images --- p.87Chapter 5.6 --- Conclusion --- p.90Chapter 6 --- The Blur-SURE Approach to Motion Deblurring --- p.93Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.93Chapter 6.1.1 --- Background of motion deblurring --- p.93Chapter 6.1.2 --- Related work: parametric estimation of motion blur --- p.93Chapter 6.1.3 --- Outline of this chapter --- p.94Chapter 6.2 --- Parametric estimation of motion blur: problem formulation --- p.94Chapter 6.2.1 --- Parametrized form of linear motion blur --- p.94Chapter 6.2.2 --- The blur-SURE framework to motion blur estimation --- p.94Chapter 6.3 --- An example of the blur-SURE approach to motion blur estimation --- p.95Chapter 6.4 --- Implementation issues --- p.96Chapter 6.4.1 --- Estimation of motion direction --- p.97Chapter 6.4.2 --- Estimation of blur length --- p.97Chapter 6.4.3 --- Short summary --- p.98Chapter 6.5 --- Results and discussions --- p.98Chapter 6.5.1 --- Experimental setting --- p.98Chapter 6.5.2 --- Estimations of blur direction and length --- p.99Chapter 6.5.3 --- Motion deblurring: the synthetic experiments --- p.99Chapter 6.5.4 --- Motion deblurring: the real experiment --- p.101Chapter 6.6 --- Conclusion --- p.103Chapter 7 --- Epilogue --- p.107Chapter 7.1 --- Summary --- p.107Chapter 7.2 --- Perspectives --- p.108Chapter A --- Proof --- p.109Chapter A.1 --- Proof of Theorem 2.1 --- p.109Chapter A.2 --- Proof of Eq.(2.6) in Section 2.4.2 --- p.110Chapter A.3 --- Proof of Eq.(3.5) in Section 3.3.1 --- p.110Chapter A.4 --- Proof of Theorem 3.6 --- p.112Chapter A.5 --- Proof of Theorem 3.12 --- p.112Chapter A.6 --- Derivation of noise variance in 2-D case (Section 3.5.4) --- p.114Chapter A.7 --- Proof of Theorem 4.1 --- p.116Chapter A.8 --- Proof of Theorem 4.2 --- p.11

Computer Vision Sensing Systems for Structural Health Monitoring in Challenging Field Conditions

Computer vision sensing techniques enable easy-to-install and remote non-contact monitoring of structures and have great potentials in field applications. This study will develop/implement novel computer vision techniques for two sensing systems for monitoring different aspects of infrastructures in challenging field conditions. The dissertation is therefore composed of two parts: robust measurement of global multi-point structural displacements, and accurate and robust monitoring of local surface displacements/strains. Computer vision based displacement measurement has become popular in the recent decade. The first part presents InnoVision, a vision sensing system developed to address a number of challenging problems associated with applying vision sensors to the measurement of multi-point structural displacement in field conditions that are rarely comprehensively studied in the literature. The challenging problems include tracking low-contrast natural targets on the structural surface, insufficient resolution for long distance measurement, inevitable camera vibration, and image distortion due to heat haze in hot weather. Several techniques are developed in InnoVision to tackle these challenges. Laboratory and field tests are conducted to evaluate the performance of these techniques. In the second part, another vision sensing system SurfaceVision is developed for accurate and robust monitoring two-dimensional (2D) structural surface displacements/strains. Important structures, such as nuclear power plants, need the continuous inspection of surface conditions. As an alternative to the human inspection, conventional digital-image-correlation (DIC) based methods have been applied to surfaces painted with speckle patterns in a controlled environment. However, it is highly challenging for DIC methods to accurately measure displacement on natural concrete surfaces in outdoor conditions with changing illumination and weather conditions. Additionally, common surface displacement measurement is based on segmenting the surface image into small subsets and tracking each subset individually through template matching, the surface displacement thus obtained has obvious discontinuity and low spatial resolution. Therefore, for applicability in the outdoor environment, SurfaceVision is proposed for accurate and robust monitoring of surface displacements/strains. Advanced computer vision techniques are developed/implemented to enable surface displacement measurement with high continuity, spatial resolution, accuracy, and robustness. An intuitive strain calculation method is also developed for converting surface displacements into surface strains. A numerical simulation is formulated based on four-point bending tests to validate the accuracy and robustness of SurfaceVision in surface displacements. Four-point bending experiments using reinforced concrete specimens are conducted to demonstrate the performance of SurfaceVision under different cases of optical noises and its effectiveness in predicting crack formations