Deep Network for Simultaneous Decomposition and Classification in UWB-SAR Imagery

Classifying buried and obscured targets of interest from other natural and manmade clutter objects in the scene is an important problem for the U.S. Army. Targets of interest are often represented by signals captured using low-frequency (UHF to L-band) ultra-wideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology. This technology has been used in various applications, including ground penetration and sensing-through-the-wall. However, the technology still faces a significant issues regarding low-resolution SAR imagery in this particular frequency band, low radar cross sections (RCS), small objects compared to radar signal wavelengths, and heavy interference. The classification problem has been firstly, and partially, addressed by sparse representation-based classification (SRC) method which can extract noise from signals and exploit the cross-channel information. Despite providing potential results, SRC-related methods have drawbacks in representing nonlinear relations and dealing with larger training sets. In this paper, we propose a Simultaneous Decomposition and Classification Network (SDCN) to alleviate noise inferences and enhance classification accuracy. The network contains two jointly trained sub-networks: the decomposition sub-network handles denoising, while the classification sub-network discriminates targets from confusers. Experimental results show significant improvements over a network without decomposition and SRC-related methods

Orthogonally Regularized Deep Networks For Image Super-resolution

Deep learning methods, in particular trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently been shown to produce compelling state-of-the-art results for single image Super-Resolution (SR). Invariably, a CNN is learned to map the low resolution (LR) image to its corresponding high resolution (HR) version in the spatial domain. Aiming for faster inference and more efficient solutions than solving the SR problem in the spatial domain, we propose a novel network structure for learning the SR mapping function in an image transform domain, specifically the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). As a first contribution, we show that DCT can be integrated into the network structure as a Convolutional DCT (CDCT) layer. We further extend the network to allow the CDCT layer to become trainable (i.e. optimizable). Because this layer represents an image transform, we enforce pairwise orthogonality constraints on the individual basis functions/filters. This Orthogonally Regularized Deep SR network (ORDSR) simplifies the SR task by taking advantage of image transform domain while adapting the design of transform basis to the training image set

Deep MR Brain Image Super-Resolution Using Spatio-Structural Priors

High resolution Magnetic Resonance (MR) images are desired for accurate diagnostics. In practice, image resolution is restricted by factors like hardware and processing constraints. Recently, deep learning methods have been shown to produce compelling state-of-the-art results for image enhancement/super-resolution. Paying particular attention to desired hi-resolution MR image structure, we propose a new regularized network that exploits image priors, namely a low-rank structure and a sharpness prior to enhance deep MR image super-resolution (SR). Our contributions are then incorporating these priors in an analytically tractable fashion \color{black} as well as towards a novel prior guided network architecture that accomplishes the super-resolution task. This is particularly challenging for the low rank prior since the rank is not a differentiable function of the image matrix(and hence the network parameters), an issue we address by pursuing differentiable approximations of the rank. Sharpness is emphasized by the variance of the Laplacian which we show can be implemented by a fixed feedback layer at the output of the network. As a key extension, we modify the fixed feedback (Laplacian) layer by learning a new set of training data driven filters that are optimized for enhanced sharpness. Experiments performed on publicly available MR brain image databases and comparisons against existing state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed prior guided network offers significant practical gains in terms of improved SNR/image quality measures. Because our priors are on output images, the proposed method is versatile and can be combined with a wide variety of existing network architectures to further enhance their performance.Comment: Accepted to IEEE transactions on Image Processin