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Photographs are taken as valid evidences in various scenarios of our day to day life. Because of the developments in the field of Image Processing, altering images according to ones need is not a difficult task. Techniques of Image Forensics play its crucial role at this juncture. One of the mostly found types of image tampering is Copy-Move forgery. A copy-move forgery is performed by copying a region in an image and pasting it on another region in the same image, mostly after some form of post-processing like rotation, scaling, blurring, noise addition, JPEG compression etc. Two types of copy-move forgery detection techniques exist in literature. They are the Block based methods and Key-point based methods. Both the methods have their own advantages and limitations. This paper presents a survey on the recent developments in block based methods. As forgeries have become popular, the importance of forgery detection is much increased. Copy-move forgery, one of the most commonly used methods, copies a part of the image and pastes it into another part of the image. In this paper, we propose a detection method of copy-move forgery that localizes duplicated regions using Zernike moments. Since the magnitude of Zernike moments is algebraically invariant against rotation, the proposed method can detect a forged region even though it is rotated. Our scheme is also resilient to the intentional distortions such as additive white Gaussian noise, JPEG compression, and blurring. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is appropriate to identify the forged region by copy-rotate-move forgery.

Because of the cost and complexity of implementing an optical paper sorting system, the demand for an intelligent system for waste paper sorting has increased. This research focused on the development of a smart intelligent system (SIS) for recyclable waste paper sorting. The basis for selecting the regions of interests (ROIs) is the margin area of a paper object image because almost all printed documents keep the margin area intact. The paper grade is identified using a proximity search. The SIS with the HSI colour space offered maximum success rates of 99 %, 82 % and 89 %, while with the RGB model, the classification success rates were 94 %, 93 % and 98 % for white paper, old newsprint paper and old corrugated cardboard, respectively. The SIS is clearly superior to other prevailing techniques because of the faster decision making and lower cost of implementation.

Number plate recognition brings a drastic improvement for the city traffic enhancement. It provides the direction in which the steps should be taken for working of an effective intelligent transportation system. ANPR have become necessity for traffic control management due to rapid increment of vehicles. The main aim of ANPR is to monitor traffic and for security purpose. Recognition of number plate uses image processing techniques and latest technology in detecting characters on vehicle license plates automatically. In recent years, there are many technological developments in recognizing license plate area of research. Image processing protocols like OCR technology allow the traffic surveillance to deal with several problems that occurs in criminal investigation, toll collection, monitoring traffic, controlling speed, parking management etc. For efficient management of traffic and mass surveillance in transportation system, an ANPR system is essential. With the aid of image processing algorithms and vehicle images dataset, it becomes possible to monitor traffic at a large scale. Vehicle images are helpful for recognizing characters on license plates by performing image segmentation, feature extraction and character recognition. Data collected through captured images are utilized in the commercial applications, law enforcement, traffic applications etc. The software examines the vehicle picture as an input image that results in displaying the plate numbers. The system with image processing used reliably for traffic detection where modification of the technologies enables an accurate acknowledgement of vehicle number plates. There are several ANPR systems developed, working on character recognition of LP by the help of image processing technique. This paper reviews the performance by researchers in this particular area towards meeting goals of transportation system. It also provides major issues and challenges in this field.

We explored the paper augmentation technique where a tablet computer is placed under the paper to modify its content appearance and create the illusion of a static object appearing perceptually dynamic. Our approach is based on the Deformation Lamps (DL) technique commonly used with front projection. However, we applied it to rear projection, which removes the need for a fixed hardware setup or handling and wearing dedicated hardware. The key challenge was to ensure the appropriate mixing of light reflecting from the paper (to see what is printed on the paper) and the light passing though the paper (to see what the tablet screen is projecting) since (i) a tablet screen is a relatively weak light source when being used in rear projection and (ii) commonly, paper has high opacity so the content from one side is not visible on the other side. In order to achieve the appropriate mixing of light, we reduced the opacity of the paper by perforating it (thus allowing more light to pass through), and modified the algorithm for generating dynamic luminance animation by adding gamma and brightness correction. The outcomes provide a guide on how to modify the paper and the algorithm in order to achieve the DL effect with rear projection using a tablet computer.

Color 3D printing allows for 3D-printed parts to represent 3D objects more realistically, but its surface color quality evaluation lacks comprehensive objective verification considering printing materials. In this study, a unique test model was designed and printed using eco-friendly and vivid paper-based full-color 3D printing as an example. By measuring the chromaticity, roughness, glossiness, and whiteness properties of 3D-printed surfaces and by acquiring images of their main viewing surfaces, this work skillfully explores the correlation between the color representation of a paper-based 3D-printed coloring layer and its attached underneath blank layer. Quantitative analysis was performed using ΔE*ab, feature similarity index measure of color image (FSIMc), and improved color-image-difference (iCID) values. The experimental results show that a color difference on color-printed surfaces exhibits a high linear correlation trend with its FSIMc metric and iCID metric. The qualitative analysis of microscopic imaging and the quantitative analysis of the above three surface properties corroborate the prediction of the linear correlation between color difference and image-based metrics. This study can provide inspiration for the development of computational coloring materials for additive manufacturing.

Surface texture is a critical feature in the manufacture, marketing, and use of photographic paper. Raking light reveals texture through a stark rendering of highlights and shadows. Though close-up raking light images effectively document surface features of photographic paper, the sheer number and diversity of textures used for historic papers prohibits efficient visual classification. This work provides evidence that automatic, computer-based classification of texture documented with raking light is feasible by demonstrating an encouraging degree of success sorting a set of 120 images made from samples of historic silver gelatin paper. Using this dataset, four university teams applied different image-processing strategies for automatic feature extraction and degree of similarity quantification.All four approaches successfully detected strong affinities and outliers built into the dataset. The creation and deployment of the algorithms was carried out by the teams without prior knowledge of the distributions of similarities and outliers.These results indicate that automatic classification of silver gelatin photographic paper based on close-up texture images is feasible and should be pursued. To encourage the development of other classification schemes, the 120-sample “training” dataset used in this work is available to other academic researchers at http://www.PaperTextureID.org.

A secure medical image watermarking framework using SVD, DE, step space filling curve and IntDCT is proposed. The proposed algorithm starts with partition of the host medical image into 8×8 blocks and then IntDCT is applied in each block. By collecting integer DC coefficients, a feeble resolution medical image is obtained. SVD is applied on this feeble resolution image. For maintaining a strong relationship between imperceptibility and robustness, the popular differential evolution (DE) technique is chosen to examine the most suitable scaling factors. The singular values of the host image are modified with the singular values of the watermark to insert the watermark in the host image. Here, DE is playing a very important role to determine the most suitable scaling factors to the embedded process for maintaining the dilemma between robustness and imperceptibility without degrading the nobility of medical images. To increase the security of the watermark image, first it is scuffled with the help of step space filling curve before the embedding process. The experimental observations and results proved the efficiency of the proposed framework. It maintains the quality of the watermarked images and the watermark can be extracted from the seriously malformed images.

Steganography is the art of hiding a secret message inside a publicly visible carrier message. Ideally, it is done without modifying the carrier, and with minimal loss of information in the secret message. Recently, various deep learning based approaches to steganography have been applied to different message types. We propose a deep learning based technique to hide a source RGB image message inside finite length speech segments without perceptual loss. To achieve this, we train three neural networks; an encoding network to hide the message in the carrier, a decoding network to reconstruct the message from the carrier and an additional image enhancer network to further improve the reconstructed message. We also discuss future improvements to the algorithm proposed.

We present a mathematical technique for using Hermite functions to reconstruct various types of images. Even though the functions are not orthogonal, they can be used in image processing. The functions permit us to get good localization of the signals and it is shown that we get better reconstructed image quality for a larger number of Hermite functions used. Finally, we use a Hermit function frame to decompose and reconstruct a few types of images and compare the results for various number of Hermit functions.

We propose a method to learn 3D deformable object categories from raw single-view images, without external supervision. The method is based on an autoencoder that factors each input image into depth, albedo, viewpoint and illumination. In order to disentangle these components without supervision, we use the fact that many object categories have, at least in principle, a symmetric structure. We show that reasoning about illumination allows us to exploit the underlying object symmetry even if the appearance is not symmetric due to shading. Furthermore, we model objects that are probably, but not certainly, symmetric by predicting a symmetry probability map, learned end-to-end with the other components of the model. Our experiments show that this method can recover very accurately the 3D shape of human faces, cat faces and cars from single-view images, without any supervision or a prior shape model. On benchmarks, we demonstrate superior accuracy compared to another method that uses supervision at the level of 2D image correspondences., CVPR 2020 Oral. Project page: https://elliottwu.com/projects/unsup3d/

We present Siam R-CNN, a Siamese re-detection architecture which unleashes the full power of two-stage object detection approaches for visual object tracking. We combine this with a novel tracklet-based dynamic programming algorithm, which takes advantage of re-detections of both the first-frame template and previous-frame predictions, to model the full history of both the object to be tracked and potential distractor objects. This enables our approach to make better tracking decisions, as well as to re-detect tracked objects after long occlusion. Finally, we propose a novel hard example mining strategy to improve Siam R-CNN's robustness to similar looking objects. Siam R-CNN achieves the current best performance on ten tracking benchmarks, with especially strong results for long-term tracking. We make our code and models available at www.vision.rwth-aachen.de/page/siamrcnn., Comment: CVPR 2020 camera-ready version

This paper studies the authentication problem of specific pieces of paper using mobile imaging devices. Prior work showing high matching accuracy has used the normal vector field , which serves as a unique, microscopic, physically unclonable feature of paper surfaces, estimated by consumer grade scanners. Industrial cameras were also used to capture the appearance of the surface rendered after the normal vector field based on the laws of optics under a semi-controlled lighting condition. In comparison, past explorations based on mobile cameras were very limited and have not had substantial success in obtaining consistent appearance images due to the uncontrolled nature of the ambient light. We show in this paper that images captured by mobile cameras can be used for authentication when the camera flashlight is exploited for creating a semi-controlled lighting condition. We have proposed new algorithms to demonstrate that the normal vector field of paper surface can be estimated by using multiple camera-captured images of different viewpoints. Perturbation analysis shows that the proposed method is robust to inaccurate estimates of camera locations, and a matching accuracy of $10^{-\textrm {4}}$ in equal error rate can be achieved using 6 to 8 images under a lab-controlled ambient light environment. Our findings can relax the restricted imaging setups and enable paper authentication under a more casual, ubiquitous setting with a mobile imaging device, which may facilitate duplicate detection of paper documents and counterfeit mitigation of merchandise packaging.

New light steering projectors in cinema form images by moving light away from dark regions into bright areas of an image. In these systems, the peak luminance of small features can far exceed full screen white luminance. In traditional projectors where light is filtered or blocked in order to give shades of gray (or colors), the peak luminance is fixed. The luminance of chromatic features benefit in the same way as white features, and chromatic image details can be reproduced at high brightness leading to a much wider overall color gamut coverage than previously possible. Projectors of this capability are desired by the creative community to aid in and enhance storytelling. Furthermore, reduced light source power requirements of light steering projectors provide additional economic and environmental benefits. While the dependency of peak luminance level on (bright) image feature size is new in the digital cinema space, display technologies with identical characteristics such as OLED, LED LCD and Plasma TVs are well established in the home. Similarly, direct view LED walls are popular in events, advertising and architectural markets. To enable consistent color reproduction across devices in today’s content production pipelines, models that describe modern projectors and display attributes need to evolve together with HDR standards and available metadata. This paper is a first step towards rethinking legacy display descriptors such as contrast, peak luminance and color primaries in light of new display technology. We first summarize recent progress in the field of light steering projectors in cinema and then, based on new projector and existing display characteristics propose the inclusion of two simple display attributes: Maximum Average Luminance and Peak (Color) Primary Luminance. We show that the proposed attributes allow a better prediction of content reproducibility on HDR displays. To validate this assertion, we test professional content on a commercial HDR television system and show that the proposed attributes better predict if a pixel value lies inside the capabilities of a display or not.

Paper checks may have complex background features including fine lines and patterns, which make forgery more difficult. Also, halftoning techniques are used to produce continuous tones and to prevent copies with void pantograph features. When these kinds of checks are scanned, Moire patterns may occur. These patterns make it difficult for customers to examine the scanned check images on ATM (Automated Teller Machine) displays. They also can decrease the classification accuracy of check recognition systems. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to enhance the perceptual quality of scanned check images by reducing the Moire patterns. The proposed algorithm consists of foreground extraction, Moire detection and Moire removal. Subjective image quality assessment was performed to evaluate the degree of improvement. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves perceptual quality while maintaining check recognition accuracy.

The human visual system uses cast shadows to judge the three-dimensional layout of an object. The purpose of this installation is to demonstrate novel visual illusions of depth and transparency for paper materials, which is induced by the conventional light projection of cast shadow patterns. Thus, this installation focuses on perceptual rather than technical aspects. Illuminating a target object, the spatial vicinity of the object is darkened to produce the visual impression of a shadow of the object. By controlling the blurriness of the cast shadow and/or spatial distance between the object and its shadow, a perceptual change in the layout of the object is induced. The audience can interactively enjoy visual experiences wherein objects and letters on a paper perceptually float in the air. We also demonstrate that it is possible to edit the material appearance of a real object by manipulating the shape of the shadow; an opaque colored paper appear to be a transparent color film floating in the air.

Video content is used extensively in many fields. However, in some fields, video manipulation techniques are required to improve the human-friendliness of such content. In this paper, we propose a method that automatically generates animations in the style of colored paper mosaics, to create human-friendly, artistic imagery. To enhance temporal coherence while maintaining the characteristics of colored paper mosaics, we also propose a particle video-based method that determines coherent locations for tiles in animations. The proposed method generates evenly distributed particles, which are used to produce animated tiles via our tile modeling process.

Image mosaicing is one of the most important subjects of research in computer vision at current. Image mocaicing requires the integration of direct techniques and feature based techniques. Direct techniques are found to be very useful for mosaicing large overlapping regions, small translations and rotations while feature based techniques are useful for small overlapping regions. Feature based image mosaicing is a combination of corner detection, corner matching, motion parameters estimation and image stitching. Furthermore, image mosaicing is considered the process of obtaining a wider field-of-view of a scene from a sequence of partial views, which has been an attractive research area because of its wide range of applications, including motion detection, resolution enhancement, monitoring global land usage, and medical imaging. Numerous algorithms for image mosaicing have been proposed over the last two decades. In this paper the authors present a review on different approaches for image mosaicing and the literature over the past few years in the field of image masaicing methodologies. The authors take an overview on the various methods for image mosaicing. This review paper also provides an in depth survey of the existing image mosaicing algorithms by classifying them into several groups. For each group, the fundamental concepts are first clearly explained. Finally this paper also reviews and discusses the strength and weaknesses of all the mosaicing groups.

Developing a wide field of view (FOV) optical see-through (OST) head mounted display (HMD) has been a challenge for decades. Naturally, the actual effects of a wide FOV OST display on the perception of augmentations have not been widely studied either. We previously proposed a wide FOV head mounted projective display (HMPD) using a hyperboloidal semitransparent mirror and a semi-transparent retroreflective screen, called the wearable HHMPD [1]. Main features of the wearable HHMPD include a horizontal FOV of 110 degrees and a visual acuity of around 20/200. Using the wearable HHMPD, we then conducted a user study investigating the effects of a wide FOV in augmented reality (AR) [2]. Results show that target discovery rates consistently drop with in-view labelling and increase with in-situ labelling as display angle approaches 100 degrees of FOV. Past this point, the performances of the two view management methods begin to converge, suggesting equivalent discovery rates at approximately 130 degrees of FOV. Results also indicate that users exhibited lower discovery rates for targets appearing in peripheral vision, and that there is little impact of FOV on response time and mental workload.

Image inpainting has been widely investigated to remove undesired parts of images. One of the effective approaches is exemplar-based inpainting, which uses texture patterns in an image as exemplars for filling in missing regions. As one of exemplar-based methods, an inpainting method based on automatic perspective correction using vanishing points was recently proposed. However, the target scene is limited to artificial one in which vanishing points are easily detectable. Although some other methods for automatic perspective correction have also been proposed, the effect on image inpainting has not been evaluated in detail so far. This paper analyzes the effect of multiple methods for automatic perspective correction on image inpainting by developing a method that combines a variety of automatic perspective correction methods and image inpainting. Specifically, we examine the influence of the amount of perspective distortion and characteristics of textures on image inpainting results by using images distorted by simulation. We also examine the effect using real images. In addition, we demonstrate the advantage of employing multiple criteria for perspective correction over the conventional method from the analyzed results.

This paper provides an extensive study on the availability of image representations based on convolutional networks (ConvNets) for the task of visual instance retrieval. Besides the choice of convo ...

The process of modifying images to achieve improved resultant images is called image enhancement. Though there are some researches done on image enhancement of Bangla document images but research on enhancement of newsprint Bangla document images is almost an untouched field of research. So for enhancing Bangla newsprint document images we have divided our whole working procedure into three phases. At the first phase, we have tried to explore the main reason behind the failure of well known image enhancement techniques on newsprint papers by running out analytic experimentation. In second phase we proposed a tentative framework by applying commonly used mathematical morphology method in a modified way. But due to huge diversity of Bangla letters this approach also did not provide the expected output. Finally, in the third phase we have proposed a framework addressing the issues of the second phase, where we have used bitmap color substitution method along with the well known Sauvola's algorithm. To enhance the result more we have then modified Sauvola's algorithm to fill missing edges along the horizontal and vertical lines.

International audience; In this paper, we investigate the retrieval of paper watermark by visual similarity. We propose to perform the visual similarity by encoding small regions of the watermark using a non-negative dictionary optimized on a large collection of watermarks. The local codes are then aggregated into a single vector representing the whole watermark. Experiments are carried out on a test of tracings (manual binarization of watermarks).

Drivers with a fatigue condition have always become basic problem for many accidents. Driver supposes required to identify the object in front of the vehicle and need to understand the causes of accidents and trouble in vehicle control. Now a day with the increasing traffic conditions, possibility for accidents is increased in a large space because driver is unable to detect themselves the type of fatigue condition they are suffering while driving. So the reason we are going to develop the system which always monitors driver's to avoid accidents in real time. This paper describes dissimilar methods existing for detecting the crisis of driver vigilance and then with comparison of all also chooses best system out of those accessible. As of comparison with all existing methods we have implemented a device which always monitors driver vigilance in real-time using computer vision system which consist of main components as, Raspberry Pi which is specially designed for hardware platform, video camera, and the alarm system for alerting.

These days digital image forgery has turned out to be unsophisticated because of capable PCs, propelled image editing softwares and high resolution capturing gadgets. Checking the respectability of pictures and identifying hints of altering without requiring additional pre-embedded information of the picture or pre-installed watermarks are essential examine field. An endeavor is prepared to review the current improvements in the research area of advanced picture fraud detection and comprehensive reference index has been exhibited on passive methods for forgery identification. Passive techniques donot require pre-embedded information in the image. Several image forgery detection techniques are arranged first and after that their summed up organization is produced. Author will review the various image forgery detection techniques along with their results and also compare the various different techniques based on their accuracy.

In this paper, we focus on a human hand recognition system for human-robot interaction. The motion of the human hand is so dynamic that the hand needs to be tracked at high speed, and non-blurred images are required to achieve stable and correct recognition. Moreover, a wide recognition area is necessary for natural interaction. To achieve these aims, we constructed a new active sensing system that can actively track and recognize the human hand by using a high-speed vision system. An application that clearly requires high-speed recognition and actuation is the rock-paper-scissors game between a human and a robot, and we focused on this task to demonstrate the proposed system. In this situation, we track a human hand at high speed and detect its sign (rock, paper, or scissors) correctly in every frame. Our experiments showed that the robot hand formed its sign to beat the human opponent in natural interaction thanks to its high speed and wide recognition area.

In this paper, a framework for human hand movement recognition is implemented for humans to play rock-paper-scissors game interactively against computer using a webcam. The game is the classic rock-paper-scissors game; however, first player is human and second player is computer. Human hand movements are recognized using a webcam, and the game is fully controlled using hand gestures. A dataset is constructed in this work by collecting hand images of different people. The dataset contains rock, paper, and scissors movements of different humanbeings. There are 8 photos for each movement and person using their left and right hands. The dataset is constructed using a controlled environment with black background and close up hand images. To recognize player movements two different feature extraction methods and two different classification methods are used and compared. Histogram of oriented gradients feature extraction method combined with support vector machines are found to be effective. It presents fast and effective computer vision framework for seamless playing experience with a sensitivity of %92.9.

Falsification of medicines is a big problem in many developing countries, where technological infrastructure is inadequate to detect these harmful products. We have developed a set of inexpensive paper cards, called Paper Analytical Devices (PADs), which can efficiently classify drugs based on their chemical composition, as a potential solution to the problem. These cards have different reagents embedded in them which produce a set of distinctive color descriptors upon reacting with the chemical compounds that constitute pharmaceutical dosage forms. If a falsified version of the medicine lacks the active ingredient or includes substitute fillers, the difference in color is perceivable by humans. However, reading the cards with accuracy takes training and practice, which may hamper their scaling and implementation in low resource settings. To deal with this, we have developed an automatic visual recognition system to read the results from the PAD images. At first, the optimal set of reagents was found by running singular value decomposition on the intensity values of the color tones in the card images. A dataset of cards embedded with these reagents is produced to generate the most distinctive results for a set of 26 different active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and excipients. Then, we train two popular convolutional neural network (CNN) models, with the card images. We also extract some "hand-crafted" features from the images and train a nearest neighbor classifier and a non-linear support vector machine with them. On testing, higher-level features performed much better in accurately classifying the PAD images, with the CNN models reaching the highest average accuracy of over 94\%., Comment: in Proc. IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2016

Monetary transactions are integral part of our day to day activities, so currency recognition has become one of the active research area at present and it has vast potential applications. In this paper we introduced a system to recognize and classify four different currencies using computer vision. As there are 200+different currencies used in different countries around the world. The technology of currency recognition aims to search and extract the visible as well as hidden marks on paper currency for efficient classification. The features are extracted based on color, texture and shape for four different currencies and they are classified using Artificial Neural network.

Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics - Theory and Applications : International Joint Conference, VISIGRAPP 2015, Berlin, Germany, March 11-14, 2015, Revised Selected Papers

Highly realistic visualization becomes crucial in numerous applications such as: medical imaging, simulation and entertainment systems. In this article, we describe the image/video capture system aimed for autostereoscopic multiview displays, as well as view interpolation and image restoration algorithms used to enhance the image quality. We evaluate the proposed algorithms on a head tracking based stereoscopic multiview display.

International audience; Mobile phone camera-based document video scan- ning is an interesting research problem which has entered into a new era with the emergence of widely used, processing capable and motion sensors equipped smartphones. We present our ongoing research on mobile phone camera-based document image mosaic reconstruction method for video scanning of paper documents. In this work, we have optimized the classic keypoint feature descriptor based image registration method, by employing the accelerometer and gyroscope sensor data. Experimental results are evaluated using optical character recognition (OCR) on the reconstructed mosaic from mobile phone camera-based video scanning of paper documents.

We deal with the 3D reconstruction of deformed paperlike surfaces given a template and a single perspective image, for which the internal camera parameters are known. The general problem is ill-posed. We show that when the surface rulings are parallel the problem is well-posed. Given a procedure to recover the rulings direction, this particular problem is equivalent to the reconstruction of a 2D curve seen from a set of ID camera pairs given a ID template. Paper can be physically modeled by exploiting local properties. This allows us to formulate the reconstruction problem by non linear variational optimization. We provide experimental results which validate our approach on simulated and real data.

Due to the rise in performance of digital printing, image-based applications are gaining popularity. This creates needs for specifying the quality potential of printers and materials in more detail than before. Both production and end-use standpoints are relevant. This paper gives an overview of an on-going study which has the goal of determining a framework model for the visual quality potential of paper in color image printing. The approach is top-down and it is founded on the concept of a layered network model. The model and its subjective, objective and instrumental measurement layers are discussed. Some preliminary findings are presented. These are based on data from samples obtained by printing natural image contents and simple test fields on a wide range of paper grades by ink-jet in a color managed process. Color profiles were paper specific. Visual mean opinion score data by human observers could be accounted for by two or three dimensions. In the first place these are related to brightness and color brightness. Image content has a marked effect on the dimensions. This underlines the challenges in designing the test images.

The necessity of image fusion is growing in recently in image processing applications due to the tremendous amount of acquisition systems. Fusion of images is defined as an alignment of noteworthy Information from diverse sensors using various mathematical models to generate a single compound image. The fusion of images is used for integrating the complementary multi-temporal, multi-view and multi-sensor Information into a single image with improved image quality and by keeping the integrity of important features. It is considered as a vital pre-processing phase for several applications such as robot vision, aerial, satellite imaging, medical imaging, and a robot or vehicle guidance. In this paper, various state-of-art image fusion methods of diverse levels with their pros and cons, various spatial and transform based method with quality metrics and their applications in different domains have been discussed. Finally, this review has concluded various future directions for different applications of image fusion.

We address the problem of exposure correction of dark, blurry and noisy images captured in low-light conditions in the wild. Classical image-denoising filters work well in the frequency space but are constrained by several factors such as the correct choice of thresholds, frequency estimates etc. On the other hand, traditional deep networks are trained end-to-end in the RGB space by formulating this task as an image-translation problem. However, that is done without any explicit constraints on the inherent noise of the dark images and thus produce noisy and blurry outputs. To this end we propose a DCT/FFT based multi-scale loss function, which when combined with traditional losses, trains a network to translate the important features for visually pleasing output. Our loss function is end-to-end differentiable, scale-agnostic, and generic; i.e., it can be applied to both RAW and JPEG images in most existing frameworks without additional overhead. Using this loss function, we report significant improvements over the state-of-the-art using quantitative metrics and subjective tests., Comment: Published version 8 pages. SIViP (2021)

Identifying a forged printed document with scanned evidence can be a challenge. Microscopic printing is showing random shape which depends on the printing source as well as printing material. This paper presents a statistical analysis of the printing patterns under a microscopic scale, analyses the effect of printing direction, printing substrate (uncoated and coated paper), and printing technology (conventional offset, waterless offset, and electrophotography). The analysis shows a negligible effect of printing direction, yet, using the shape descriptor indexes, the printing materials and technologies are distinguishable under a microscopic scale. As a result, the algorithms based on Support Vectors Machine and Random Forest are developed, with shape descriptor indexes as features, for printing source identification. Both proposed algorithms, equally, achieve a high classification accuracy rate, over 92% accuracy with complex geometric-shape patterns. Thanks to the lightweight and efficiency of the Support Vectors Machine, the study shows promising applications for real-world and potential implementation in the Internet of Things devices.

Nowadays, autonomous vehicle is an active research area, especially after the emergence of machine vision tasks with deep learning. In such a visual navigation system for autonomous vehicle, the controller captures images and predicts information so that the autonomous vehicle can safely navigate. In this paper, we first introduced small and medium-sized obstacles that were intentionally or unintentionally left on the road, which can pose hazards for both autonomous and human driving situations. Then, we discuss Markov random field (MRF) model by fusing three potentials (gradient potential, curvature prior potential, and depth variance potential) to segment the obstacles and non-obstacles into the hazardous environment. Since the segment of obstacles is done by MRF model, we can predict the information to safely navigate the autonomous vehicle form hazardous environment on the roadway by DNN model. We found that our proposed method can segment the obstacles accuracy from the blended background road and improve the navigation skills of the autonomous vehicle.

Any computer vision application development starts off by acquiring images and data, then preprocessing and pattern recognition steps to perform a task. When the acquired images are highly imbalanced and not adequate, the desired task may not be achievable. Unfortunately, the occurrence of imbalance problems in acquired image datasets in certain complex real-world problems such as anomaly detection, emotion recognition, medical image analysis, fraud detection, metallic surface defect detection, disaster prediction, etc., are inevitable. The performance of computer vision algorithms can significantly deteriorate when the training dataset is imbalanced. In recent years, Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GANs) have gained immense attention by researchers across a variety of application domains due to their capability to model complex real-world image data. It is particularly important that GANs can not only be used to generate synthetic images, but also its fascinating adversarial learning idea showed good potential in restoring balance in imbalanced datasets.In this paper, we examine the most recent developments of GANs based techniques for addressing imbalance problems in image data. The real-world challenges and implementations of synthetic image generation based on GANs are extensively covered in this survey. Our survey first introduces various imbalance problems in computer vision tasks and its existing solutions, and then examines key concepts such as deep generative image models and GANs. After that, we propose a taxonomy to summarize GANs based techniques for addressing imbalance problems in computer vision tasks into three major categories: 1. Image level imbalances in classification, 2. object level imbalances in object detection and 3. pixel level imbalances in segmentation tasks. We elaborate the imbalance problems of each group, and provide GANs based solutions in each group. Readers will understand how GANs based techniques can handle the problem of imbalances and boost performance of the computer vision algorithms.

This paper develops an enhanced teaching interface tested on both a Baxter robot and a KUKA iiwa robot. Movements are collected from a human demonstrator by using a Kinect v2 sensor, and then the data is sent to a remote PC for the teleoperation with Baxter. Meanwhile, data is saved locally for the playback process of the Baxter. The dynamic movement primitive (DMP) is used to model and generalize the movements. In order to learn from multiple demonstrations accurately, dynamic time warping (DTW), is used to pretreat the data recorded by the robot platform and Gaussian mixture model (GMM), aiming to generate multiple patterns after the teaching process, are employed for the calculation of the DMP. Then the Gaussian mixture regression (GMR) algorithm is applied to generate a synthesized trajectory with smaller position errors in 3D space. This proposed approach is tested by performing two tasks on a KUKA iiwa and a Baxter robot.

This survey explores how Deep Learning has battled the COVID-19 pandemic and provides directions for future research on COVID-19. We cover Deep Learning applications in Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Life Sciences, and Epidemiology. We describe how each of these applications vary with the availability of big data and how learning tasks are constructed. We begin by evaluating the current state of Deep Learning and conclude with key limitations of Deep Learning for COVID-19 applications. These limitations include Interpretability, Generalization Metrics, Learning from Limited Labeled Data, and Data Privacy. Natural Language Processing applications include mining COVID-19 research for Information Retrieval and Question Answering, as well as Misinformation Detection, and Public Sentiment Analysis. Computer Vision applications cover Medical Image Analysis, Ambient Intelligence, and Vision-based Robotics. Within Life Sciences, our survey looks at how Deep Learning can be applied to Precision Diagnostics, Protein Structure Prediction, and Drug Repurposing. Deep Learning has additionally been utilized in Spread Forecasting for Epidemiology. Our literature review has found many examples of Deep Learning systems to fight COVID-19. We hope that this survey will help accelerate the use of Deep Learning for COVID-19 research.

The demand for automatic detection of Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 is increasing across the globe. The exponential rise in cases burdens healthcare facilities, and a vast amount of multimedia healthcare data is being explored to find a solution. This study presents a practical solution to detect COVID-19 from chest X-rays while distinguishing those from normal and impacted by Viral Pneumonia via Deep Convolution Neural Networks (CNN). In this study, three pre-trained CNN models (EfficientNetB0, VGG16, and InceptionV3) are evaluated through transfer learning. The rationale for selecting these specific models is their balance of accuracy and efficiency with fewer parameters suitable for mobile applications. The dataset used for the study is publicly available and compiled from different sources. This study uses deep learning techniques and performance metrics (accuracy, recall, specificity, precision, and F1 scores). The results show that the proposed approach produced a high-quality model, with an overall accuracy of 92.93%, COVID-19, a sensitivity of 94.79%. The work indicates a definite possibility to implement computer vision design to enable effective detection and screening measures.

In recent years, reversible data hiding (RDH) has become a research hotspot in the field of multimedia security that has aroused more and more researchers&rsquo, attention. Most of the existing RDH algorithms are aiming at continuous-tone images. For RDH in encrypted halftone images (RDH-EH), the original cover image cannot be recovered losslessly after the watermark is extracted. For some application scenarios such as medical or military images sharing, reversibility is critical. In this paper, a reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted color halftone images (RDH-ECH) is proposed. In the watermark embedding procedure, the cover image is copied into two identical images to increase redundancy. We use wet paper code to embed the watermark into the image blocks. Thus, the receiver only needs to process the image blocks by the check matrices in order to extract the watermarks. To increase embedding capacity, we embed three layers in the embedding procedure and combine the resulting images into one image for convenience of transmission. From the experimental results, it can be concluded that the original image can be restored entirely after the watermarks are extracted. Besides, for marked color halftone images, our algorithm can implement high embedding capacity and moderate visual quality.

Motivation Current spectral unmixing methods for multiplex fluorescence microscopy have a limited ability to cope with high spectral overlap as they only analyze spectral information over individual pixels. Here, we present adaptive Morphologically Constrained Spectral Unmixing (MCSU) algorithms that overcome this limitation by exploiting morphological differences between sub-cellular structures, and their local spatial context. Results The proposed method was effective at improving spectral unmixing performance by exploiting: (i) a set of dictionary-based models for object morphologies learned from the image data; and (ii) models of spatial context learned from the image data using a total variation algorithm. The method was evaluated on multi-spectral images of multiplex-labeled pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) tissue samples. The former constraint ensures that neighbouring pixels correspond to morphologically similar structures, and the latter constraint ensures that neighbouring pixels have similar spectral signatures. The average Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Signal Reconstruction Error (SRE) ratio of the proposed method was 39.6% less and 8% more, respectively, compared to the best of all other algorithms that do not exploit these spatial constraints. Availability and Implementation Open source software (MATLAB). Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.