Search

There is not a large research on how to use color information for improving results in image denoising. Currently, most of the methods modify the color space from standard red green blue (sRGB) to an opponent-like one as better results are obtained, but out of this conversion, color is mostly ignored in the image denoising pipelines. In this letter, we propose a color decomposition to preprocess an image before applying a typical denoising. Our decomposition consists in obtaining a set of images in the spherical coordinate system, each of them with the origin of the spherical transformation in a different color value. These color values, that we call color centers, are defined so as to be far away from the dominant colors of the image. Once in the spherical coordinate system, we perform a mild denoising operation with some state-of-the-art method in the angular components. Then, we convert these images back to sRGB, and we merge them depending on the distance between the color of each pixel and the color centers. Finally, we denoise the preprocessed image with the same state- of-the-art method used in our preprocessing. Experiments show that our method outperforms the results of directly applying the denoising method on the input image for different state-of-the-art denoising methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demosaicking is a particular case of interpolation problems where, from a scalar image in which each pixel has either the red, the green or the blue component, we want to interpolate the full-color image. State-of-the-art demosaicking algorithms perform interpolation along edges, but these edges are estimated locally. We propose a level-set-based geometric method to estimate image edges, inspired by the image inpainting literature. This method has a time complexity of O(S), where S is the number of pixels in the image, and compares favorably with the state-of-the-art algorithms both visually and in most relevant image quality measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video is usually acquired in interlaced format, where each image frame is composed of two image fields, each field holding same parity lines. However, many display devices require progressive video as input; also, many video processing tasks perform better on progressive material than on interlaced video. In the literature, there exist a great number of algorithms for interlaced to progressive video conversion, with a great tradeoff between the speed and quality of the results. The best algorithms in terms of image quality require motion compensation; hence, they are computationally very intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel deinterlacing algorithm based on ideas from the image inpainting arena. We view the lines to interpolate as gaps that we need to inpaint. Numerically, this is implemented using a dynamic programming procedure, which ensures a complexity of O(S), where S is the number of pixels in the image. The results obtained with our algorithm compare favorably, in terms of image quality, with state-of-the-art methods, but at a lower computational cost, since we do not need to perform motion field estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, we present an efficient method for movie denoising that does not require any motion estimation. The method is based on the well-known fact that averaging several realizations of a random variable reduces the variance. For each pixel to be denoised, we look for close similar samples along the level surface passing through it. With these similar samples, we estimate the denoised pixel. The method to find close similar samples is done via warping lines in spatiotemporal neighborhoods. For that end, we present an algorithm based on a method for epipolar line matching in stereo pairs which has per-line complexity 0(N), where N is the number of columns in the image. In this way, when applied to the image sequence, our algorithm is computationally efficient, having a complexity of the order of the total number of pixels. Furthermore, we show that the presented method is unsupervised and is adapted to denoise image sequences with an additive white noise while respecting the visual details on the movie frames. We have also experimented with other types of noise with satisfactory results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a discussion about perceptual-based color correction of digital images in the framework of variational techniques. We propose a novel image functional whose minimization produces a perceptually inspired color enhanced version of the original. The variational formulation permits a more flexible local control of contrast adjustment and attachment to data. We show that a numerical implementation of the gradient descent technique applied to this energy functional coincides with the equation of automatic color enhancement (ACE), a particular perceptual-based model of color enhancement. Moreover, we prove that a numerical approximation of the Euler-Lagrange equation reduces the computational complexity of ACE from O(N²) to O(N log N), where N is the total number of pixels in the image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A framework for inpainting missing parts of a video sequence recorded with a moving or stationary camera is presented in this work. The region to be inpainted is general: It may be still or moving, in the background or in the foreground, it may occlude one object and be occluded by some other object. The algorithm consists of a simple preprocessing stage and two steps of video inpainting. In the preprocessing stage, we roughly segment each frame into foreground and background. We use this segmentation to build three image mosaics that help to produce time consistent results and also improve the performance of the algorithm by reducing the search space. In the first video inpainting step, we reconstruct moving objects in the foreground that are ‘occluded’ by the region to be inpainted. To this end, we fill the gap as much as possible by copying information from the moving foreground in other frames, using a priority-based scheme. In the second step, we inpaint the remaining hole with the background. To accomplish this, we first align the frames and directly copy when possible. The remaining pixels are filled in by extending spatial texture synthesis techniques to the spatiotemporal domain. The proposed framework has several advantages over state-of-the-art algorithms that deal with similar types of data and constraints. It permits some camera motion, is simple to implement, fast, does not require statistical models of background nor foreground, works well in the presence of rich and cluttered backgrounds, and the results show that there is no visible blurring or motion artifacts. A number of real examples taken with a consumer hand-held camera are shown supporting these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PDE-based image inpainting has become a very active area of research after the pioneering works of Masnou and Morel, Bertalmío et al., and Ballester et al. In this paper, we take a different approach, inspired by the excellent work of Caselles et al. We view the inpainting problem as a particular case of image interpolation in which we intend to propagate level lines. Expressing this in terms of local neighborhoods and using a Taylor expansion we derive a third-order PDE that performs inpainting. This PDE is optimal in the sense that it is the most accurate third-order PDE which can ensure continuation of level lines. The continuation is strong, allowing the restoration of thin structures occluded by a wide gap. The result is also contrast invariant. This is a novel PDE, which, in both its accuracy and contrast invariance, outperforms the approaches cited above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]