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Recent state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms are mostly based on deep neural networks, thanks to their high performance and fast computation time. However, these methods are usually trained in a supervised manner, which requires large number of high quality ground-truth segmentation masks. On the other hand, classical image segmentation approaches such as level-set methods are formulated in a self-supervised manner by minimizing energy functions such as Mumford-Shah functional, so they are still useful to help generation of segmentation masks without labels. Unfortunately, these algorithms are usually computationally expensive and often have limitation in semantic segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function based on Mumford-Shah functional that can be used in deep-learning based image segmentation without or with small labeled data. This loss function is based on the observation that the softmax layer of deep neural networks has striking similarity to the characteristic function in the Mumford-Shah functional. We show that the new loss function enables semi-supervised and unsupervised segmentation. In addition, our loss function can be also used as a regularized function to enhance supervised semantic segmentation algorithms. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method., Comment: Accepted for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Localization microscopy, such as STORM / PALM, can reconstruct super-resolution images with a nanometer resolution through the iterative localization of fluorescence molecules. Recent studies in this area have focused mainly on the localization of densely activated molecules to improve temporal resolutions. However, higher density imaging requires an advanced algorithm that can resolve closely spaced molecules. Accordingly, sparsitydriven methods have been studied extensively. One of the major limitations of existing sparsity-driven approaches is the need for a fine sampling grid or for Taylor series approximation which may result in some degree of localization bias toward the grid. In addition, prior knowledge of the point-spread function (PSF) is required. To address these drawbacks, here we propose a true grid-free localization algorithm with adaptive PSF estimation. Specifically, based on the observation that sparsity in the spatial domain implies a low rank in the Fourier domain, the proposed method converts source localization problems into Fourier-domain signal processing problems so that a truly gridfree localization is possible. We verify the performance of the newly proposed method with several numerical simulations and a live-cell imaging experiment.

In this paper, we propose a patch-based image inpainting method using a low-rank Hankel structured matrix completion approach. The proposed method exploits the annihilation property between a shift-invariant filter and image data observed in many existing inpainting algorithms. In particular, by exploiting the commutative property of the convolution, the annihilation property results in a low-rank block Hankel structure data matrix, and the image inpainting problem becomes a low-rank structured matrix completion problem. The block Hankel structured matrices are obtained patch-by-patch to adapt to the local changes in the image statistics. To solve the structured low-rank matrix completion problem, we employ an alternating direction method of multipliers with factorization matrix initialization using the low-rank matrix fitting algorithm. As a side product of the matrix factorization, locally adaptive dictionaries can be also easily constructed. Despite the simplicity of the algorithm, the experimental results using irregularly subsampled images as well as various images with globally missing patterns showed that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art image inpainting methods.

Optical diffusion tomography is a technique for imaging a highly scattering medium using measurements of transmitted modulated light. Reconstruction of the spatial distribution of the optical properties of the medium from such data is a difficult nonlinear inverse problem. Bayesian approaches are effective, but are computationally expensive, especially for three-dimensional (3-D) imaging. This paper presents a general nonlinear multigrid optimization technique suitable for reducing the computational burden in a range of nonquadratic optimization problems. This multigrid method is applied to compute the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the reconstructed image in the optical diffusion tomography problem. The proposed multigrid approach both dramatically reduces the required computation and improves the reconstructed image quality.