Information Theoretic Principles of Universal Discrete Denoising

Today, the internet makes tremendous amounts of data widely available. Often, the same information is behind multiple different available data sets. This lends growing importance to latent variable models that try to learn the hidden information from the available imperfect versions. For example, social media platforms can contain an abundance of pictures of the same person or object, yet all of which are taken from different perspectives. In a simplified scenario, one may consider pictures taken from the same perspective, which are distorted by noise. This latter application allows for a rigorous mathematical treatment, which is the content of this contribution. We apply a recently developed method of dependent component analysis to image denoising when multiple distorted copies of one and the same image are available, each being corrupted by a different and unknown noise process. In a simplified scenario, we assume that the distorted image is corrupted by noise that acts independently on each pixel. We answer completely the question of how to perform optimal denoising, when at least three distorted copies are available: First we define optimality of an algorithm in the presented scenario, and then we describe an aymptotically optimal universal discrete denoising algorithm (UDDA). In the case of binary data and binary symmetric noise, we develop a simplified variant of the algorithm, dubbed BUDDA, which we prove to attain universal denoising uniformly.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Conditional toggle mappings: principles and applications

International audienceWe study a class of mathematical morphology filters to operate conditionally according to a set of pixels marked by a binary mask. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a general framework for several applications including edge enhancement and image denoising, when it is affected by salt-and-pepper noise. We achieve this goal by revisiting shock filters based on erosions and dilations and extending their definition to take into account the prior definition of a mask of pixels that should not be altered. New definitions for conditional erosions and dilations leading to the concept of conditional toggle mapping. We also investigate algebraic properties as well as the convergence of the associate shock filter. Experiments show how the selection of appropriate methods to generate the masks lead to either edge enhancement or salt-and-pepper denoising. A quantitative evaluation of the results demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Additionally, we analyse the application of conditional toggle mapping in remote sensing as pre-filtering for hierarchical segmentation

An MDL framework for sparse coding and dictionary learning

The power of sparse signal modeling with learned over-complete dictionaries has been demonstrated in a variety of applications and fields, from signal processing to statistical inference and machine learning. However, the statistical properties of these models, such as under-fitting or over-fitting given sets of data, are still not well characterized in the literature. As a result, the success of sparse modeling depends on hand-tuning critical parameters for each data and application. This work aims at addressing this by providing a practical and objective characterization of sparse models by means of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle -- a well established information-theoretic approach to model selection in statistical inference. The resulting framework derives a family of efficient sparse coding and dictionary learning algorithms which, by virtue of the MDL principle, are completely parameter free. Furthermore, such framework allows to incorporate additional prior information to existing models, such as Markovian dependencies, or to define completely new problem formulations, including in the matrix analysis area, in a natural way. These virtues will be demonstrated with parameter-free algorithms for the classic image denoising and classification problems, and for low-rank matrix recovery in video applications

Contributions en morphologie mathématique pour l'analyse d'images multivariées

This thesis contributes to the field of mathematical morphology and illustrates how multivariate statistics and machine learning techniques can be exploited to design vector ordering and to include results of morphological operators in the pipeline of multivariate image analysis. In particular, we make use of supervised learning, random projections, tensor representations and conditional transformations to design new kinds of multivariate ordering, and morphological filters for color and multi/hyperspectral images. Our key contributions include the following points:• Exploration and analysis of supervised ordering based on kernel methods.• Proposition of an unsupervised ordering based on statistical depth function computed by random projections. We begin by exploring the properties that an image requires to ensure that the ordering and the associated morphological operators can be interpreted in a similar way than in the case of grey scale images. This will lead us to the notion of background/foreground decomposition. Additionally, invariance properties are analyzed and theoretical convergence is showed.• Analysis of supervised ordering in morphological template matching problems, which corresponds to the extension of hit-or-miss operator to multivariate image by using supervised ordering.• Discussion of various strategies for morphological image decomposition, specifically, the additive morphological decomposition is introduced as an alternative for the analysis of remote sensing multivariate images, in particular for the task of dimensionality reduction and supervised classification of hyperspectral remote sensing images.• Proposition of an unified framework based on morphological operators for contrast enhancement and salt- and-pepper denoising.• Introduces a new framework of multivariate Boolean models using a complete lattice formulation. This theoretical contribution is useful for characterizing and simulation of multivariate textures.Cette thèse contribue au domaine de la morphologie mathématique et illustre comment la statistique multivariée et les techniques d'apprentissage numérique peuvent être exploitées pour concevoir un ordre dans l'espace des vecteurs et pour inclure les résultats d'opérateurs morphologiques au processus d'analyse d'images multivariées. En particulier, nous utilisons l'apprentissage supervisé, les projections aléatoires, les représentations tensorielles et les transformations conditionnelles pour concevoir de nouveaux types d'ordres multivariés et de nouveaux filtres morphologiques pour les images multi/hyperspectrales. Nos contributions clés incluent les points suivants :• Exploration et analyse d'ordre supervisé, basé sur les méthodes à noyaux.• Proposition d'un ordre nonsupervisé, basé sur la fonction de profondeur statistique calculée par projections aléatoires. Nous commençons par explorer les propriétés nécessaires à une image pour assurer que l'ordre ainsi que les opérateurs morphologiques associés, puissent être interprétés de manière similaire au cas d'images en niveaux de gris. Cela nous amènera à la notion de décomposition en arrière plan. De plus, les propriétés d'invariance sont analysées et la convergence théorique est démontrée.• Analyse de l'ordre supervisé dans les problèmes de correspondance morphologique de patrons, qui correspond à l'extension de l'opérateur tout-ou-rien aux images multivariées grâce à l‘utilisation de l'ordre supervisé.• Discussion sur différentes stratégies pour la décomposition morphologique d'images. Notamment, la décomposition morphologique additive est introduite comme alternative pour l'analyse d'images de télédétection, en particulier pour les tâches de réduction de dimension et de classification supervisée d'images hyperspectrales de télédétection.• Proposition d'un cadre unifié basé sur des opérateurs morphologiques, pour l'amélioration de contraste et pour le filtrage du bruit poivre-et-sel.• Introduction d'un nouveau cadre de modèles Booléens multivariés en utilisant une formulation en treillis complets. Cette contribution théorique est utile pour la caractérisation et la simulation de textures multivariées