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The advent of depth sensing technologies means that the extraction of object contours in images—a common and important pre-processing step for later higher level computer vision tasks like object detection and human action recognition—has become easier. However, captured depth images contain acquisition noise and the detected contours suffer from errors as a result. In this paper, we propose to jointly denoise and compress detected contours in an image for bandwidth-constrained transmission to a client, who can then carry out aforementioned application-specific tasks using the decoded contours as input. First, we prove theoretically that in general a joint denoising/compression approach can outperform a separate two-stage approach that first denoises then encodes contours lossily. Adopting a joint approach, we propose a burst error model that models typical errors encountered in an observed string of directional edges. We then formulate a rate-constrained maximum a posteriori problem that trades off the posterior probability of an estimated string given with its code rate. We design a dynamic programming algorithm that solves the posed problem optimally, and propose a compact context representation called total suffix tree that can reduce complexity of the algorithm dramatically. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first in the literature to study the problem of joint denoising/compression of image contours and offer a computation-efficient optimization algorithm. Experimental results show that our joint denoising/compression scheme can reduce bitrate by up to 18% compared with a competing separate scheme at comparable visual quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Near-infrared gray images captured along with corresponding visible color images have recently proven useful for image restoration and classification. This paper introduces a new coloring method to add colors to near-infrared gray images based on a contrast-preserving mapping model. A naive coloring method directly adds the colors from the visible color image to the near-infrared gray image. However, this method results in an unrealistic image because of the discrepancies in the brightness and image structure between the captured near-infrared gray image and the visible color image. To solve the discrepancy problem, first, we present a new contrast-preserving mapping model to create a new near-infrared gray image with a similar appearance in the luminance plane to the visible color image, while preserving the contrast and details of the captured near-infrared gray image. Then, we develop a method to derive realistic colors that can be added to the newly created near-infrared gray image based on the proposed contrast-preserving mapping model. Experimental results show that the proposed new method not only preserves the local contrast and details of the captured near-infrared gray image, but also transfers the realistic colors from the visible color image to the newly created near-infrared gray image. It is also shown that the proposed near-infrared coloring can be used effectively for noise and haze removal, as well as local contrast enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the problem of image segmentation using the random walker algorithm. In the case of 3D images, the method uses an extreme amount of memory and time resources. These are required in order to represent the corresponding enormous image graph and to solve the resulting sparse linear system. Having in mind these limitations, this paper proposes techniques for the optimization of the random walker approach. The optimization is obtained by processing supervoxels representing homogeneous image regions rather than single voxels. A fast and efficient method for supervoxel determination is introduced. A method for the creation of an image adjacency graph from an irregular grid of supervoxels is also proposed. The results of applying the introduced approach to segmentation of 3D CT data sets are presented and compared with the results of the original random walker approach and other state-of-the-art methods. The accuracy and the computational overhead is regarded in the comparison. The analysis of results shows that the modified method can be successfully applied for the segmentation of volumetric images and provides results in a reasonable time without a significant loss in the image segmentation accuracy. It also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods considered in the comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a competitive no-reference metric is proposed to assess the perceptive quality of screen content images (SCIs), which uses the human visual edge model and AdaBoosting neural network. Inspired by the existing theory that the edge information which reflects the visual quality of SCI is effectively captured by the human visual difference of the Gaussian (DOG) model, we compute two types of multi-scale edge maps via the DOG operator firstly. Specifically, two types of edge maps contain contour and edge information respectively. Then after locally normalizing edge maps, ${L}$ -moments distribution estimation is utilized to fit their DOG coefficients, and the fitted ${L}$ -moments parameters can be regarded as edge features. Finally, to obtain the final perceptive quality score, we use an AdaBoosting back-propagation neural network (ABPNN) to map the quality-aware features to the perceptual quality score of SCIs. The reason why the ABPNN is regarded as the appropriate approach for the visual quality assessment of SCIs is that we abandon the regression network with a shallow structure, try a regression network with a deep architecture, and achieve a good generalization ability. The proposed method delivers highly competitive performance and shows high consistency with the human visual system (HVS) on the public SCI-oriented databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human visual system pays attention to salient regions while perceiving an image. When viewing a stereoscopic 3-D (S3D) image, we hypothesize that while most of the contribution to saliency is provided by the 2-D image, a small but significant contribution is provided by the depth component. Further, we claim that only a subset of image edges contribute to depth perception while viewing an S3D image. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach for depth saliency estimation, called salient edges with respect to depth perception (SED) which localizes the depth-salient edges in an S3D image. We demonstrate the utility of SED in full reference stereoscopic image quality assessment. We consider gradient magnitude and inter-gradient maps for predicting structural similarity. A coarse quality map is estimated first by comparing the 2-D saliency and gradient maps of reference and test stereo pairs. We average this quality map to estimate luminance quality and refine this quality map using SED maps for evaluating depth quality. Finally, we combine this luminance and depth quality to obtain an overall stereo image quality. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our metric on seven publicly available S3D IQA databases. The proposed metric shows competitive performance on all seven databases with state-of-the-art performance on three of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a weighted large margin nearest center (WLMNC) distance-based human depth recovery method for tele-immersive video interaction systems with limited bandwidth consumption. In the remote stage, the proposed method highly compresses the depth data of the remote human into skeletal block structures by learning the WLMNC distance, which is equivalent to downsampling the human depth map at $64{\times}$ the sampling rate. In the local stage, the method first recovers a rough human depth map based on a WLMNC distance augmented clustering approach and then obtains a fine depth map based on a rough depth-guided autoregressive model to preserve the depth discontinuities and suppress texture copy artifacts. The proposed WLMNC distance is learned by the large margin clustering problem with a weighted hinge loss to balance the clustering accuracy and depth recovery accuracy and is verified to be able to preserve depth discontinuities between skeletal block structures with occlusion. A theoretical analysis is conducted to verify the effectiveness of using the weighted hinge loss. Furthermore, a novel data set containing various types of human postures with self-occlusion is built to benchmark the human depth recovery methods. The quantitative comparison with the state-of-the-art depth recovery methods on the introduced benchmark data set demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method for human depth recovery with such a high upsampling rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contour completion plays an important role in visual perception, where the goal is to group fragmented low-level edge elements into perceptually coherent and salient contours. Most existing methods for contour completion have focused on pixelwise detection accuracy. In contrast, fewer methods have addressed the global contour closure effect, despite psychological evidences for its importance. This paper proposes a purely contour-based higher order CRF model to achieve contour closure, through local connectedness approximation. This leads to a simplified problem structure, where our higher order inference problem can be transformed into an integer linear program and be solved efficiently. Compared with the methods based on the same bottom–up edge detector, our method achieves a superior contour grouping ability (measured by Rand index), a comparable precision–recall performance, and more visually pleasing results. Our results suggest that contour closure can be effectively achieved in contour domain, in contrast to a popular view that segmentation is essential for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Driven by recent vision and graphics applications such as image segmentation and object recognition, computing pixel-accurate saliency values to uniformly highlight foreground objects becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called pixelwise image saliency aggregating (PISA) various bottom-up cues and priors. It generates spatially coherent yet detail-preserving, pixel-accurate, and fine-grained saliency, and overcomes the limitations of previous methods, which use homogeneous superpixel based and color only treatment. PISA aggregates multiple saliency cues in a global context, such as complementary color and structure contrast measures, with their spatial priors in the image domain. The saliency confidence is further jointly modeled with a neighborhood consistence constraint into an energy minimization formulation, in which each pixel will be evaluated with multiple hypothetical saliency levels. Instead of using global discrete optimization methods, we employ the cost-volume filtering technique to solve our formulation, assigning the saliency levels smoothly while preserving the edge-aware structure details. In addition, a faster version of PISA is developed using a gradient-driven image subsampling strategy to greatly improve the runtime efficiency while keeping comparable detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on a number of public data sets suggest that PISA convincingly outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, with this work, we also create a new data set containing 800 commodity images for evaluating saliency detection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When imaging through a semi-reflective medium such as glass, the reflection of another scene can often be found in the captured images. It degrades the quality of the images and affects their subsequent analyses. In this paper, a novel deep neural network approach for solving the reflection problem in imaging is presented. Traditional reflection removal methods not only require long computation time for solving different optimization functions, their performance is also not guaranteed. As array cameras are readily available in nowadays imaging devices, we first suggest in this paper a multiple-image based depth estimation method using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed network avoids the depth ambiguity problem due to the reflection in the image, and directly estimates the depths along the image edges. They are then used to classify the edges as belonging to the background or reflection. Since edges having similar depth values are error prone in the classification, they are removed from the reflection removal process. We suggest a generative adversarial network (GAN) to regenerate the removed background edges. Finally, the estimated background edge map is fed to another auto-encoder network to assist the extraction of the background from the original image. Experimental results show that the proposed reflection removal algorithm achieves superior performance both quantitatively and qualitatively as compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed algorithm also shows much faster speed compared to the existing approaches using the traditional optimization methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pansharpening is an important application in remote sensing image processing. It can increase the spatial-resolution of a multispectral image by fusing it with a high spatial-resolution panchromatic image in the same scene, which brings great favor for subsequent processing such as recognition, detection, etc. In this paper, we propose a continuous modeling and sparse optimization based method for the fusion of a panchromatic image and a multispectral image. The proposed model is mainly based on reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) and approximated Heaviside function (AHF). In addition, we also propose a Toeplitz sparse term for representing the correlation of adjacent bands. The model is convex and solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers which guarantees the convergence of the proposed method. Extensive experiments on many real datasets collected by different sensors demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique as compared with several state-of-the-art pansharpening approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objects that do not lie at the focal distance of a digital camera generate defocused regions in the captured image. This paper presents a new edge-based method for spatially varying defocus blur estimation using a single image based on reblurred gradient magnitudes. The proposed approach initially computes a scale-consistent edge map of the input image and selects a local reblurring scale aiming to cope with noise, edge mis-localization, and interfering edges. An initial blur estimate is computed at the detected scale-consistent edge points and a novel connected edge filter is proposed to smooth the sparse blur map based on pixel connectivity within detected edge contours. Finally, a fast guided filter is used to propagate the sparse blur map through the whole image. Experimental results show that the proposed approach presents a very good compromise between estimation error and running time when compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We also explore our blur estimation method in the context of image deblurring, and show that metrics typically used to evaluate blur estimation may not correlate as expected with the visual quality of the deblurred image. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Object skeletons are useful for object representation and object detection. They are complementary to the object contour, and provide extra information, such as how object scale (thickness) varies among object parts. But object skeleton extraction from natural images is very challenging, because it requires the extractor to be able to capture both local and non-local image context in order to determine the scale of each skeleton pixel. In this paper, we present a novel fully convolutional network with multiple scale-associated side outputs to address this problem. By observing the relationship between the receptive field sizes of the different layers in the network and the skeleton scales they can capture, we introduce two scale-associated side outputs to each stage of the network. The network is trained by multi-task learning, where one task is skeleton localization to classify whether a pixel is a skeleton pixel or not, and the other is skeleton scale prediction to regress the scale of each skeleton pixel. Supervision is imposed at different stages by guiding the scale-associated side outputs toward the ground-truth skeletons at the appropriate scales. The responses of the multiple scale-associated side outputs are then fused in a scale-specific way to detect skeleton pixels using multiple scales effectively. Our method achieves promising results on two skeleton extraction datasets, and significantly outperforms other competitors. In addition, the usefulness of the obtained skeletons and scales (thickness) are verified on two object detection applications: foreground object segmentation and object proposal detection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a scalable approximate Bayesian method for image restoration using Total Variation (TV) priors, with the ability to offer uncertainty quantification. In contrast to most optimization methods based on maximum a posteriori estimation, we use the Expectation Propagation (EP) framework to approximate minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimates and marginal (pixel-wise) variances, without resorting to Monte Carlo sampling. For the classical anisotropic TV-based prior, we also propose an iterative scheme to automatically adjust the regularization parameter via Expectation Maximization (EM). Using Gaussian approximating densities with diagonal covariance matrices, the resulting method allows highly parallelizable steps and can scale to large images for denoising, deconvolution, and compressive sensing (CS) problems. The simulation results illustrate that such EP methods can provide a posteriori estimates on par with those obtained via sampling methods but at a fraction of the computational cost. Moreover, EP does not exhibit strong underestimation of posteriori variances, in contrast to variational Bayes alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) attempts to achieve an “all-focused” image from multiple source images with the same scene but different focused objects. Given the lack of multi-focus image sets for network training, we propose a self-supervised residual feature learning model in this paper. The model consists of a feature extraction network and a fusion module. We select image super-resolution as a pretext task in the MFIF field, which is supported by a new residual gradient prior discovered by our theoretical study for low- and high-resolution (LR-HR) image pairs, as well as for multi-focus images. In the pretext task, our network’s training set is LR-HR image pairs generated from natural images, and HR images can be regarded as pseudo-labels of LR images. In the fusion task, the trained network extracts residual features of multi-focus images firstly. Secondly, the fusion module, consisting of an activity level measurement and a new boundary refinement method, is leveraged for the features to generated decision maps. Experimental results, both subjective evaluations and objective evaluations, demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art fusion algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most existing methods of human parsing still face a challenge: how to extract the accurate foreground from similar or cluttered scenes effectively. In this paper, we propose a Grammar-induced Wavelet Network (GWNet), to deal with the challenge. GWNet mainly consists of two modules, including a blended grammar-induced module and a wavelet prediction module. We design the blended grammar-induced module to exploit the relationship of different human parts and the inherent hierarchical structure of a human body by means of grammar rules in both cascaded and paralleled manner. In this way, conspicuous parts, which are easily distinguished from the background, can amend the segmentation of inconspicuous ones, improving the foreground extraction. We also design a Part-aware Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (PCRNN) to pass messages which are generated by grammar rules. To further improve the performance, we propose a wavelet prediction module to capture the basic structure and the edge details of a person by decomposing the low-frequency and high-frequency components of features. The low-frequency component can represent the smooth structures and the high-frequency components can describe the fine details. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate GWNet on PASCAL-Person-Part, LIP, and PPSS datasets. GWNet obtains state-of-the-art performance on these human parsing datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a dynamic graph modeling approach to learn spatial-temporal representations for video summarization. Most existing video summarization methods extract image-level features with ImageNet pre-trained deep models. Differently, our method exploits object-level and relation-level information to capture spatial-temporal dependencies. Specifically, our method builds spatial graphs on the detected object proposals. Then, we construct a temporal graph by using the aggregated representations of spatial graphs. Afterward, we perform relational reasoning over spatial and temporal graphs with graph convolutional networks and extract spatial-temporal representations for importance score prediction and key shot selection. To eliminate relation clutters caused by densely connected nodes, we further design a self-attention edge pooling module, which disregards meaningless relations of graphs. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks, including the SumMe and TVSum datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art video summarization methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Normalized Cut (NCut) model is a popular graph-based model for image segmentation. But it suffers from the excessive normalization problem and weakens the small object and twig segmentation. In this paper, we propose an Explored Normalized Cut (ENCut) model that establishes a balance graph model by adopting a meaningful-loop and a k-step random walk, which reduces the energy of small salient region, so as to enhance the small object segmentation. To improve the twig segmentation, our ENCut model is further enhanced by a new Random Walk Refining Term (RWRT) that adds local attention to our model with the help of an un-supervising random walk. Finally, a move-making based strategy is developed to efficiently solve the ENCut model with RWRT. Experiments on three standard datasets indicate that our model can achieve state-of-the-art results among the NCut-based segmentation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel method for boundary detection in close-range hyperspectral images. This method can effectively predict the boundaries of objects of similar colour but different materials. To effectively extract the material information in the image, the spatial distribution of the spectral responses of different materials or endmembers is first estimated by hyperspectral unmixing. The resulting abundance map represents the fraction of each endmember spectra at each pixel. The abundance map is used as a supportive feature such that the spectral signature and the abundance vector for each pixel are fused to form a new spectral feature vector. Then different spectral similarity measures are adopted to construct a sparse spectral-spatial affinity matrix that characterizes the similarity between the spectral feature vectors of neighbouring pixels within a local neighborhood. After that, a spectral clustering method is adopted to produce eigenimages. Finally, the boundary map is constructed from the most informative eigenimages. We created a new HSI dataset and use it to compare the proposed method with four alternative methods, one for hyperspectral image and three for RGB image. The results exhibit that our method outperforms the alternatives and can cope with several scenarios that methods based on colour images cannot handle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different from the object motion blur, the defocus blur is caused by the limitation of the cameras’ depth of field. The defocus amount can be characterized by the parameter of point spread function and thus forms a defocus map. In this paper, we propose a new network architecture called Defocus Image Deblurring Auxiliary Learning Net (DID-ANet), which is specifically designed for single image defocus deblurring by using defocus map estimation as auxiliary task to improve the deblurring result. To facilitate the training of the network, we build a novel and large-scale dataset for single image defocus deblurring, which contains the defocus images, the defocus maps and the all-sharp images. To the best of our knowledge, the new dataset is the first large-scale defocus deblurring dataset for training deep networks. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DID-ANet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for both tasks of defocus image deblurring and defocus map estimation, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The dataset, code, and model is available on GitHub: https://github.com/xytmhy/DID-ANet-Defocus-Deblurring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many state-of-the-art compression systems, signal transformation is an integral part of the encoding and decoding process, where transforms provide compact representations for the signals of interest. This paper introduces a class of transforms called graph-based transforms (GBTs) for video compression, and proposes two different techniques to design GBTs. In the first technique, we formulate an optimization problem to learn graphs from data and provide solutions for optimal separable and nonseparable GBT designs, called GL-GBTs. The optimality of the proposed GL-GBTs is also theoretically analyzed based on Gaussian-Markov random field (GMRF) models for intra and inter predicted block signals. The second technique develops edge-adaptive GBTs (EA-GBTs) in order to flexibly adapt transforms to block signals with image edges (discontinuities). The advantages of EA-GBTs are both theoretically and empirically demonstrated. Our experimental results show that the proposed transforms can significantly outperform the traditional Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computing the convolution between a 2D signal and a corresponding filter with variable orientations is a basic problem that arises in various tasks ranging from low level image processing (e.g. ridge/edge detection) to high level computer vision (e.g. pattern recognition). Through decades of research, there still lacks an efficient method for solving this problem. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the perspective of approximation by considering the following problem: what is the optimal basis for approximating all rotated versions of a given bivariate function? Surprisingly, solely minimising the $L^{2}$ -approximation-error leads to a rotation-covariant linear expansion, which we name Fourier-Argand representation. This representation presents two major advantages: 1) rotation-covariance of the basis, which implies a “strong steerability” — rotating by an angle $\alpha $ corresponds to multiplying each basis function by a complex scalar $e^{-ik\alpha }$ ; 2) optimality of the Fourier-Argand basis, which ensures a few number of basis functions suffice to accurately approximate complicated patterns and highly direction-selective filters. We show the relation between the Fourier-Argand representation and the Radon transform, leading to an efficient implementation of the decomposition for digital filters. We also show how to retrieve accurate orientation of local structures/patterns using a fast frequency estimation algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a blind text image deblurring algorithm by using a text-specific hybrid dictionary. After careful analysis, we find that the text-specific hybrid dictionary has the great ability of providing powerful contextual information for text image deblurring. Here, it is worth noting that our proposed method is inspired by our observation that an intermediate latent image contains not only sharp regions, but also multiple types of small blurred regions. Based upon our discovery, we propose a prior for text images based on sparse representation, which models the relationship between an intermediate latent image and a desired sharp image. To this end, we carefully collect three different image patch pairs, which are 1) Gaussian blur-sharp, 2) motion blur-sharp, and 3) sharp-sharp, in order to construct the text-specific hybrid dictionary. We also propose a new optimization framework suitable for the task of text image deblurring in this paper. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a challenging dataset of synthetic and real-world text images. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art image deblurring methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper initially develops the discrete-point sampling operator's concept, model, and parameters that we have previously proposed, and makes its belt-shaped regions in a discrete-point sampling map more salient and appropriate for centerline extraction. The cross-sectional features of these belt-shaped regions are then analyzed and seven types of feature points are defined to facilitate descriptions of such features. Based on these feature points, a three-level detection system is proposed, including feature points, line segments, and centerlines, to extract centerlines from the belt-shaped regions. Eight basic types of centerlines and five types of relationships among the centerlines are defined by computational geometry algorithms, and Gestalt laws are used to cluster them into groupings. If some prior information about a desired shape is available, retrieval grouping may be carried out by a discrete-point sampling map, the purpose of which is to find centerlines by best matching with prior information. Discrete-point sampling effectually overcomes the influences of interference from noise, textures, and uneven illumination, and greatly reduces the difficulty of centerline extraction. Centerline clustered groupings and retrieval grouping can offer a strong anti-interference ability with nonlinear deformations such as articulation and occlusion. This method can extract large-scale complex shapes combined of lines and planes from complex images. The wheel location results of noise test and other shape extraction experiments show that our method has a strong capability to persist with nonlinear deformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph-based representation (GBR) has recently been proposed for describing color and geometry of multiview video content. The graph vertices represent the color information, while the edges represent the geometry information, i.e., the disparity, by connecting corresponding pixels in two camera views. In this paper, we generalize the GBR to multiview images with complex camera configurations. Compared with the existing GBR, the proposed representation can handle not only horizontal displacements of the cameras but also forward/backward translations, rotations, etc. However, contrary to the usual disparity that is a 2-D vector (denoting horizontal and vertical displacements), each edge in GBR is represented by a 1-D disparity. This quantity can be seen as the disparity along an epipolar segment. In order to have a sparse (i.e., easy to code) graph structure, we propose a rate-distortion model to select the most meaningful edges. Hence the graph is constructed with “just enough” information for rendering the given predicted view. The experiments show that the proposed GBR allows high reconstruction quality with lower or equivalent coding rate than traditional depth-based representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arithmetic mean and the order statistical median are two fundamental operations in signal and image processing. They have their own merits and limitations in noise attenuation and image structure preservation. This paper proposes an iterative algorithm that truncates the extreme values of samples in the filter window to a dynamic threshold. The resulting nonlinear filter shows some merits of both the fundamental operations. Some dynamic truncation thresholds are proposed that guarantee the filter output, starting from the mean, to approach the median of the input samples. As a by-product, this paper unveils some statistics of a finite data set as the upper bounds of the deviation of the median from the mean. Some stopping criteria are suggested to facilitate edge preservation and noise attenuation for both the long- and short-tailed distributions. Although the proposed iterative truncated mean (ITM) algorithm is not aimed at the median, it offers a way to estimate the median by simple arithmetic computing. Some properties of the ITM filters are analyzed and experimentally verified on synthetic data and real images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we are concerned with image downsampling using subpixel techniques to achieve superior sharpness for small liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Such a problem exists when a high-resolution image or video is to be displayed on low-resolution display terminals. Limited by the low-resolution display, we have to shrink the image. Signal-processing theory tells us that optimal decimation requires low-pass filtering with a suitable cutoff frequency, followed by downsampling. In doing so, we need to remove many useful image details causing blurring. Subpixel-based downsampling, taking advantage of the fact that each pixel on a color LCD is actually composed of individual red, green, and blue subpixel stripes, can provide apparent higher resolution. In this paper, we use frequency-domain analysis to explain what happens in subpixel-based downsampling and why it is possible to achieve a higher apparent resolution. According to our frequency-domain analysis and observation, the cutoff frequency of the low-pass filter for subpixel-based decimation can be effectively extended beyond the Nyquist frequency using a novel antialiasing filter. Applying the proposed filters to two existing subpixel downsampling schemes called direct subpixel-based downsampling (DSD) and diagonal DSD (DDSD), we obtain two improved schemes, i.e., DSD based on frequency-domain analysis (DSD-FA) and DDSD based on frequency-domain analysis (DDSD-FA). Experimental results verify that the proposed DSD-FA and DDSD-FA can provide superior results, compared with existing subpixel or pixel-based downsampling methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Texture filtering seeks to smooth out textured details in order to present structures prominently. To filter out multi-scale textured details while preserving structures, some methods propose to adjust the size of the filtering windows by handling the pixels near structures with small windows and the other pixels with large windows. Unfortunately, their adjustment measures are not very effective in treating complex situations. They may handle the pixels inside small structures with large windows, which overly smooths them, or they may be incapable of smoothing out large-scale textures. With regard to this, in this paper, we present a novel method that adjusts the window size for a pixel by checking similar pixels in its neighborhood. In general, pixels nearer structures have fewer similar pixels in their neighborhoods than the pixels that are farther away from structures. Thus, our adjustment can adaptively adjust window sizes by the distances from pixels to structures, which improves the potential to treat complex situations. The experimental results show that we can well filter out very large-scale textures while preserving small structures with high quality in a manner superior to the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our method is very simple and efficient, and can be used easily in applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defocus blur detection is an important and challenging task in computer vision and digital imaging fields. Previous work on defocus blur detection has put a lot of effort into designing local sharpness metric maps. This paper presents a simple yet effective method to automatically obtain the local metric map for defocus blur detection, which based on the feature learning of multiple convolutional neural networks (ConvNets). The ConvNets automatically learn the most locally relevant features at the super-pixel level of the image in a supervised manner. By extracting convolution kernels from the trained neural network structures and processing it with principal component analysis, we can automatically obtain the local sharpness metric by reshaping the principal component vector. Meanwhile, an effective iterative updating mechanism is proposed to refine the defocus blur detection result from coarse to fine by exploiting the intrinsic peculiarity of the hyperbolic tangent function. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently performed better than the previous state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel scheme of edge detection based on the physical law of diffusion is presented in this paper. Though the most current studies are using data based methods such as deep neural networks, these methods on machine learning need big data of labeled ground truth as well as a large amount of resources for training. On the other hand, the widely used traditional methods are based on the gradient of the grayscale or color of images with using different sorts of mathematical tools to accomplish the mission. Instead of treating the outline of an object in an image as a kind of gradient of grayscale or color, our scheme deals with the edge detection as a character of an energy diffusing in the space of media such as charge-coupled device. By using the characteristic function of diffusion, the information of the energy will be extracted. The scheme preserves the structural information of images very well. Because it comes from the inhere law of images’ physical property, it has a unified mathematical framework for images’ edge detection under different conditions, for example, multiscales, diferent light conditions, and so on. Moreover, it has low computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multispectral imaging is of wide application for its capability in acquiring the spectral information of scenes. Due to hardware limitation, multispectral imaging device usually cannot achieve high-spatial resolution. To address the issue, this paper proposes a multispectral image super-resolution algorithm, referred as SRIF, by fusing the low-resolution multispectral image and the high-resolution (HR) RGB image. It deals with the general circumstance that image intensity is linear to scene radiance for multispectral imaging devices while is nonlinear and unknown for most RGB cameras. The SRIF algorithm first solves the inverse camera response function and a spectral sensitivity function of RGB camera, and establishes the linear relationship between multispectral and RGB images. Then the unknown HR multispectral image is efficiently reconstructed according to the linear image degradation models. Meanwhile, the edge structure of the reconstructed HR multispectral image is kept in accordance with that of the RGB image using a weighted total variation regularizer. The effectiveness of the SRIF algorithm is evaluated on both public datasets and our image set. Experimental results validate that the SRIF algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-arts in terms of both reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an effective novel content-aware chroma reconstruction (CACR) method for screen content images (SCIs). After receiving the decoded downsampled YUV image on the client side, our fast chroma-copy approach reconstructs the missing chroma pixels in the flat regions of SCI. Then, for non-flat regions, a non-flat region-based winner-first voting (NRWV) strategy is proposed to identify the chroma subsampling scheme used on the server side prior to compression. Further, an effective adaptive hybrid approach is proposed to reconstruct each missing chroma pixel in the non-flat region by fusing the two reconstructed results, one from our modified NRWV-based chroma subsampling-binding and luma-guided chroma reconstruction scheme, which favors the sharp edges in SCI, as well as the other from the bicubic interpolation scheme, which favors blurred and continuous-tone textures. Further, based on the identified chroma subsampling scheme, a geometry alignment-based error compensation approach is proposed to enhance the reconstructed chroma image. Based on typical test SCIs and JCT-VC screen content videos, comprehensive experiments are carried out in HEVC-16.17 to demonstrate that in terms of quality, visual effect, and quality-bitrate tradeoff of the reconstructed SCIs, our CACR method significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many analysis-based regularizations proposed so far employ a common prior information, i.e., edges in an image are sparse. However, in local edge regions and texture regions, this prior may not hold. As a result, the performance of regularizations based on the edge sparsity may be unsatisfactory in such regions for image-related inverse problems. These regularizations tend to smooth out the edges while eliminating the noise. In other words, these regularizations’ abilities of preserving edges are limited. In this paper, a new prior that the corner points in a natural image are sparse was proposed to construct regularizations. Intuitively, even in local edge regions and texture regions, the sparsity of corner points may still exist, and hence, the regularizations based on it can achieve better performance than those based on the edge sparsity. As an example, by utilizing the sparsity of corner points, we proposed a new regularization based on Noble’s corner measure function. Our experiments demonstrated the excellent performance of the proposed regularization for both image denoising and deblurring problems, especially in local edge regions and texture regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a special class of functions called smoothlets is presented. They are defined as a generalization of wedgelets and second-order wedgelets. Unlike all known geometrical methods used in adaptive image approximation, smoothlets are continuous functions. They can adapt to location, size, rotation, curvature, and smoothness of edges. The M-term approximation of smoothlets is O(M^-3). In this paper, an image compression scheme based on the smoothlet transform is also presented. From the theoretical considerations and experiments, both described in the paper, it follows that smoothlets can assure better image compression than the other known adaptive geometrical methods, namely, wedgelets and second-order wedgelets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bilateral filter is a non-linear filter that uses a range filter along with a spatial filter to perform edge-preserving smoothing of images. A direct computation of the bilateral filter requires $O(S)$ operations per pixel, where $S$ is the size of the support of the spatial filter. In this paper, we present a fast and provably accurate algorithm for approximating the bilateral filter when the range kernel is Gaussian. In particular, for box and Gaussian spatial filters, the proposed algorithm can cut down the complexity to $O(1)$ per pixel for any arbitrary $S$ . The algorithm has a simple implementation involving $N+1$ spatial filterings, where $N$ is the approximation order. We give a detailed analysis of the filtering accuracy that can be achieved by the proposed approximation in relation to the target bilateral filter. This allows us to estimate the order $N$ required to obtain a given accuracy. We also present comprehensive numerical results to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of speed and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blind motion deblurring from a single image is a highly under-constrained problem with many degenerate solutions. A good approximation of the intrinsic image can, therefore, only be obtained with the help of prior information in the form of (often nonconvex) regularization terms for both the intrinsic image and the kernel. While the best choice of image priors is still a topic of ongoing investigation, this research is made more complicated by the fact that historically each new prior requires the development of a custom optimization method. In this paper, we develop a stochastic optimization method for blind deconvolution. Since this stochastic solver does not require the explicit computation of the gradient of the objective function and uses only efficient local evaluation of the objective, new priors can be implemented and tested very quickly. We demonstrate that this framework, in combination with different image priors produces results with Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values that match or exceed the results obtained by much more complex state-of-the-art blind motion deblurring algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goal of this paper is guided image filtering, which emphasizes the importance of structure transfer during filtering by means of an additional guidance image. Where classical guided filters transfer structures using hand-designed functions, recent guided filters have been considerably advanced through parametric learning of deep networks. The state-of-the-art leverages deep networks to estimate the two core coefficients of the guided filter. In this work, we posit that simultaneously estimating both coefficients is suboptimal, resulting in halo artifacts and structure inconsistencies. Inspired by unsharp masking, a classical technique for edge enhancement that requires only a single coefficient, we propose a new and simplified formulation of the guided filter. Our formulation enjoys a filtering prior from a low-pass filter and enables explicit structure transfer by estimating a single coefficient. Based on our proposed formulation, we introduce a successive guided filtering network, which provides multiple filtering results from a single network, allowing for a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive ablations, comparisons and analysis show the effectiveness and efficiency of our formulation and network, resulting in state-of-the-art results across filtering tasks like upsampling, denoising, and cross-modality filtering. Code is available at https://github.com/shizenglin/Unsharp-Mask-Guided-Filtering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have made great progress in the task of salient object detection and existing state-of-the-arts methods mainly focus on how to integrate edge information in deep aggregation models. In this paper, we propose a novel Decomposition and Completion Network (DCN), which integrates edge and skeleton as complementary information and models the integrity of salient objects in two stages. In the decomposition network, we propose a cross multi-branch decoder, which iteratively takes advantage of cross-task aggregation and cross-layer aggregation to integrate multi-level multi-task features and predict saliency, edge, and skeleton maps simultaneously. In the completion network, edge and skeleton maps are further utilized to fill flaws and suppress noises in saliency maps via hierarchical structure-aware feature learning and multi-scale feature completion. Through jointly learning with edge and skeleton information for localizing boundaries and interiors of salient objects respectively, the proposed network generates precise saliency maps with uniformly and completely segmented salient objects. Experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing networks. Furthermore, we extend the proposed model to the task of RGB-D salient object detection, and it also achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/wuzhe71/DCN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved great improvements in blind image motion deblurring. However, most existing image deblurring methods require a large amount of paired training data and fail to maintain satisfactory structural information, which greatly limits their application scope. In this paper, we present an unsupervised image deblurring method based on a multi-adversarial optimized cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN). Although original CycleGAN can handle unpaired training data well, the generated high-resolution images are probable to lose content and structure information. To solve this problem, we utilize a multi-adversarial mechanism based on CycleGAN for blind motion deblurring to generate high-resolution images iteratively. In this multi-adversarial manner, the hidden layers of the generator are gradually supervised, and the implicit refinement is carried out to generate high-resolution images continuously. Meanwhile, we also introduce the structure-aware mechanism to enhance the structure and detail retention ability of the multi-adversarial network for deblurring by taking the edge map as guidance information and adding multi-scale edge constraint functions. Our approach not only avoids the strict need for paired training data and the errors caused by blur kernel estimation, but also maintains the structural information better with multi-adversarial learning and structure-aware mechanism. Comprehensive experiments on several benchmarks have shown that our approach prevails the state-of-the-art methods for blind image motion deblurring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimal paths are regarded as a powerful and efficient tool for boundary detection and image segmentation due to its global optimality and the well-established numerical solutions such as fast marching method. In this paper, we introduce a flexible interactive image segmentation model based on the Eikonal partial differential equation (PDE) framework in conjunction with region-based homogeneity enhancement. A key ingredient in the introduced model is the construction of local geodesic metrics, which are capable of integrating anisotropic and asymmetric edge features, implicit region-based homogeneity features and/or curvature regularization. The incorporation of the region-based homogeneity features into the metrics considered relies on an implicit representation of these features, which is one of the contributions of this work. Moreover, we also introduce a way to build simple closed contours as the concatenation of two disjoint open curves. Experimental results prove that the proposed model indeed outperforms state-of-the-art minimal paths-based image segmentation approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Voronoi diagram-based dual-front scheme is known as a powerful and efficient technique for addressing the image segmentation and domain partitioning problems. In the basic formulation of existing dual-front approaches, the evolving contour can be considered as the interfaces of adjacent Voronoi regions. Among these dual-front models, a crucial ingredient is regarded as the geodesic metrics by which the geodesic distances and the corresponding Voronoi diagram can be estimated. In this paper, we introduce a new dual-front model based on asymmetric quadratic metrics. These metrics considered are built by the integration of the image features and a vector field derived from the evolving contour. The use of the asymmetry enhancement can reduce the risk for the segmentation contours being stuck at false positions, especially when the initial curves are far away from the target boundaries or the images have complicated intensity distributions. Moreover, the proposed dual-front model can be applied for image segmentation in conjunction with various region-based homogeneity terms. The numerical experiments on both synthetic and real images show that the proposed dual-front model indeed achieves encouraging results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SISR). However, most existing CNN-based SISR methods directly learn the relation between low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) images, neglecting to explore the recurrence of internal patches, hence hindering the representational power of CNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel single image Super-Resolution network based on Graph ATtention network (SRGAT) to make full use of the internal patch-recurrence in a natural image. The proposed model employs a feature mapping block with a recurrent structure to refine low-level representations with high-level information. Especifically, the feature mapping block contains a parallel graph similarity branch and a content branch, where the graph similarity branch aims at exploiting the similarity and symmetry across different image patches in low-resolution feature space and provides additional priors for the content branch to enhance texture details. Specifically, we consider the internal patch-recurrence of an image by constructing a graph network on image feature patches. In this way, the information from neighboring patches can be interacted using graph attention network (GAT) to help it recover additional textures, which complements the textures learned from the content branch. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art super-resolution methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image processing in hexagonal lattice has many advantages rather than square lattice. Researchers have addressed benefits of hexagonal structure in applications such as binarization, rotation, scaling and edge detection. Approximately all existing hardwares for capturing and displaying images are based on square lattice. Therefore, the best way for using advantages of hexagonal lattice is to find a proper software approach to convert square pixels to hexagonal ones. This paper presents a hexagonal platform based on interpolation which addresses three existing hexagonal challenges including imperfect hexagonal shape, inaccurate intensity level of hexagonal pixels and lower resolution in hexagonal space. The proposed interpolation is computed by overlaps between square and hexagonal pixels. Overlap types are formulated mathematically in 8 separate cases. Each overlap case is detected automatically and used to compute final gray-level intensity of hexagonal pixels. It is mathematically and experimentally shown that the proposed method satisfies necessary conditions for square-to-hexagonal conversion. The proposed scheme is evaluated on synthetic and real images with 10 different levels of noise in interpolation and edge detection applications. In synthetic images, the proposed method achieves the best figure of merit (FOM) 99.92% and 98.67% in high and low SNRs 100 and 20, respectively. Also, the proposed method outperforms existing state of the art hexagonal lattices with interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) 84.18% and mean rating 7.7 (out of 9) in real images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is essential for many computer vision tasks. In some real-world applications, such as object recognition and image classification, the captured image size can be arbitrary while the required image size is fixed, which necessitates SISR with arbitrary scaling factors. It is a challenging problem to take a single model to accomplish the SISR task under arbitrary scaling factors. To solve that problem, this paper proposes a bilateral upsampling network which consists of a bilateral upsampling filter and a depthwise feature upsampling convolutional layer. The bilateral upsampling filter is made up of two upsampling filters, including a spatial upsampling filter and a range upsampling filter. With the introduction of the range upsampling filter, the weights of the bilateral upsampling filter can be adaptively learned under different scaling factors and different pixel values. The output of the bilateral upsampling filter is then provided to the depthwise feature upsampling convolutional layer, which upsamples the low-resolution (LR) feature map to the high-resolution (HR) feature space depthwisely and well recovers the structural information of the HR feature map. The depthwise feature upsampling convolutional layer can not only efficiently reduce the computational cost of the weight prediction of the bilateral upsampling filter, but also accurately recover the textual details of the HR feature map. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed bilateral upsampling network can achieve better performance than some state-of-the-art SISR methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defocus blur detection (DBD), which has been widely applied to various fields, aims to detect the out-of-focus or in-focus pixels from a single image. Despite the fact that the deep learning based methods applied to DBD have outperformed the hand-crafted feature based methods, the performance cannot still meet our requirement. In this paper, a novel network is established for DBD. Unlike existing methods which only learn the projection from the in-focus part to the ground-truth, both in-focus and out-of-focus pixels, which are completely and symmetrically complementary, are taken into account. Specifically, two symmetric branches are designed to jointly estimate the probability of focus and defocus pixels, respectively. Due to their complementary constraint, each layer in a branch is affected by an attention obtained from another branch, effectively learning the detailed information which may be ignored in one branch. The feature maps from these two branches are then passed through a unique fusion block to simultaneously get the two-channel output measured by a complementary loss. Additionally, instead of estimating only one binary map from a specific layer, each layer is encouraged to estimate the ground truth to guide the binary map estimation in its linked shallower layer followed by a top-to-bottom combination strategy, gradually exploiting the global and local information. Experimental results on released datasets demonstrate that our proposed method remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance of ellipse fitting may significantly degrade in the presence of outliers, which can be caused by occlusion of the object, mirror reflection or other objects in the process of edge detection. In this paper, we propose an ellipse fitting method that is robust against the outliers, and thus maintaining stable performance when outliers can be present. We formulate an optimization problem for ellipse fitting based on the maximum entropy criterion (MCC), having the Laplacian as the kernel function from the well-known fact that the $\ell _{1}$ -norm error measure is robust to outliers. The optimization problem is highly nonlinear and non-convex, and thus is very difficult to solve. To handle this difficulty, we divide it into two subproblems and solve the two subproblems in an alternate manner through iterations. The first subproblem has a closed-form solution and the second one is cast as a convex second-order cone program (SOCP) that can reach the global solution. By so doing, the alternate iterations always converge to an optimal solution, although it can be local instead of global. Furthermore, we propose a procedure to identify failed fitting of the algorithm caused by local convergence to a wrong solution, and thus, it reduces the probability of fitting failure by restarting the algorithm at a different initialization. The proposed robust ellipse fitting method is next extended to the coupled ellipses fitting problem. Both simulated and real data verify the superior performance of the proposed ellipse fitting method over the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superpixel segmentation, as a central image processing task, has many applications in computer vision and computer graphics. Boundary alignment and shape compactness are leading indicators to evaluate a superpixel segmentation algorithm. Furthermore, convexity can make superpixels reflect more geometric structures in images and provide a more concise over-segmentation result. In this paper, we consider generating convex and compact superpixels while satisfying the constraints of adhering to the boundary as far as possible. We formulate the new superpixel segmentation into an edge-constrained centroidal power diagram (ECCPD) optimization problem. In the implementation, we optimize the superpixel configurations by repeatedly performing two alternative operations, which include site location updating and weight updating through a weight function defined by image features. Compared with existing superpixel methods, our method can partition an image into fully convex and compact superpixels with better boundary adherence. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing superpixel segmentation methods in boundary alignment and compactness for generating convex superpixels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new texture enhancement method which uses an image decomposition that allows different visual characteristics of textures to be represented by separate components in contrast with previous methods which either enhance texture indirectly or represent all texture information using a single image component. Our method is intended to be used as a preprocessing step prior to the use of texture-based image segmentation algorithms. Our method uses a modification of morphological component analysis (MCA) which allows texture to be separated into multiple morphological components each representing a different visual characteristic of texture. We select four such texture characteristics and propose new dictionaries to extract these components using MCA. We then propose procedures for modifying each texture component and recombining them to produce a texture-enhanced image. We applied our method as a preprocessing step prior to a number of texture-based segmentation methods and compared the accuracy of the results, finding that our method produced results superior to comparator methods for all segmentation algorithms tested. We also demonstrate by example the main mechanism by which our method produces superior results, namely that it causes the clusters of local texture features of each distinct image texture to mutually diverge within the multidimensional feature space to a vastly superior degree versus the comparator enhancement methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the problem of learning robust cross-domain representations for sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR). While, most SBIR approaches focus on extracting low- and mid-level descriptors for direct feature matching, recent works have shown the benefit of learning coupled feature representations to describe data from two related sources. However, cross-domain representation learning methods are typically cast into non-convex minimization problems that are difficult to optimize, leading to unsatisfactory performance. Inspired by self-paced learning (SPL), a learning methodology designed to overcome convergence issues related to local optima by exploiting the samples in a meaningful order (i.e., easy to hard), we introduce the cross-paced partial curriculum learning (CPPCL) framework. Compared with existing SPL methods which only consider a single modality and cannot deal with prior knowledge, CPPCL is specifically designed to assess the learning pace by jointly handling data from dual sources and modality-specific prior information provided in the form of partial curricula. In addition, thanks to the learned dictionaries, we demonstrate that the proposed CPPCL embeds robust coupled representations for SBIR. Our approach is extensively evaluated on four publicly available datasets (i.e., CUFS, Flickr15K, QueenMary SBIR, and TU-Berlin Extension datasets), showing superior performance over competing SBIR methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helping robots understand indoor scenes has considerable value in computer vision. However, due to the diversity of indoor scenes, understanding them remains a big challenge. There are many spatial right-angles in indoor scenes. These spatial right-angles are projected into diverse 2D projections. These projections can be considered a composition of a pair of lines (line-pairs). Given the vanishing points (VPs), line segments can be assigned to 1 of 3 main orthogonal directions. The line-pairs (intersection of 2 lines), such that each of them converges to a different VP, are likely to be the projection of a spatial right-angle onto the image plane. These projections may enable us to estimate their original orientation and position in 3D scenes. In this paper, we presented a method to efficiently understand indoor scenes from a single image, without training or any knowledge of the camera’s internal calibration. Through geometric inference of line-pairs, it is possible to find these spatial right-angle projections. Then, these projections can be assigned to different clusters, and the line that lies in the neighbor-cluster helps us estimate the layout of the indoor scene. The proposed approach required no prior training. We compared the room layout estimated by our algorithm against the room box ground truth, measuring the percentage of pixels that were correctly classified. These experiments showed that our method estimated not only room layout, but also details of the indoor scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to understand the practical features of hierarchies of morphological segmentations, namely the quasi-flat zones hierarchy and watershed hierarchies, and to evaluate their potential in the context of natural image analysis. We propose a novel evaluation framework for the hierarchies of partitions designed to capture various aspects of those representations: precision of their regions and contours, possibility to extract high quality horizontal cuts and optimal non-horizontal cuts for image segmentation, and the ease of finding a set of regions representing a semantic object. This framework is used to assess and to optimize hierarchies with respect to the possible pre- and post-processing steps. We show that, used in conjunction with a state-of-the-art contour detector, watershed hierarchies are competitive with the complex state-of-the-art methods for hierarchy construction. In particular, the proposed framework allows us to identify a watershed hierarchy based on a novel extinction value, the number of parent nodes that outperforms the other hierarchies of morphological segmentations. This coupled with the fact that watershed hierarchies satisfy clear global optimality properties and can be efficiently computed on large data, make them valuable candidates for various computer vision tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]