Artifact reduction for separable non-local means

It was recently demonstrated [J. Electron. Imaging, 25(2), 2016] that one can perform fast non-local means (NLM) denoising of one-dimensional signals using a method called lifting. The cost of lifting is independent of the patch length, which dramatically reduces the run-time for large patches. Unfortunately, it is difficult to directly extend lifting for non-local means denoising of images. To bypass this, the authors proposed a separable approximation in which the image rows and columns are filtered using lifting. The overall algorithm is significantly faster than NLM, and the results are comparable in terms of PSNR. However, the separable processing often produces vertical and horizontal stripes in the image. This problem was previously addressed by using a bilateral filter-based post-smoothing, which was effective in removing some of the stripes. In this letter, we demonstrate that stripes can be mitigated in the first place simply by involving the neighboring rows (or columns) in the filtering. In other words, we use a two-dimensional search (similar to NLM), while still using one-dimensional patches (as in the previous proposal). The novelty is in the observation that one can use lifting for performing two-dimensional searches. The proposed approach produces artifact-free images, whose quality and PSNR are comparable to NLM, while being significantly faster.Comment: To appear in Journal of Electronic Imagin

Shear viscosity due to the Landau damping from quark-pion interaction

We have calculated the shear viscosity coefficient $\eta$ of the strongly interacting matter in the relaxation time approximation, where a quasi particle description of quarks with its dynamical mass is considered from NJL model. Due to the thermodynamic scattering of quarks with pseudo scalar type condensate (i.e. pion), a non zero Landau damping will be acquired by the propagating quarks. This Landau damping may be obtained from the Landau cut contribution of the in-medium self-energy of quark-pion loop, which is evaluated in the framework of real-time thermal field theory

QCD phase transition in rotaing neutron star, Neutrino beaming and Gamma-ray bursters

We have studied the emission of neutrinos from a rotating hybrid star. We find that the emission is predominantly confined to a very small angle, provided the core of the star is in a mixed phase of quarks and hadrons and the size of such a mixed phase is small. Annihilation of neutrinos to produce gamma rays has been discussed. The estimated duration of the burst is found to be within the observational range.Comment: Modified manuscript with 9 pages including 3 ps figures, Accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

Nonlocal Co-occurrence for Image Downscaling

Image downscaling is one of the widely used operations in image processing and computer graphics. It was recently demonstrated in the literature that kernel-based convolutional filters could be modified to develop efficient image downscaling algorithms. In this work, we present a new downscaling technique which is based on kernel-based image filtering concept. We propose to use pairwise co-occurrence similarity of the pixelpairs as the range kernel similarity in the filtering operation. The co-occurrence of the pixel-pair is learned directly from the input image. This co-occurrence learning is performed in a neighborhood based fashion all over the image. The proposed method can preserve the high-frequency structures, which were present in the input image, into the downscaled image. The resulting images retain visually important details and do not suffer from edge-blurring artifact. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach with extensive experiments on a large number of images downscaled with various downscaling factors.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure