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Full-field optical angiography (FFOA)--a real-time non-invasive imaging technique for extracting biological blood microcirculation information--contributes to an in-depth understanding of the functional and pathological changes of biological tissues. However, owing to the limitation of the depth-of-field (DOF) of optical lenses, existing FFOA imaging methods cannot capture an image containing every blood-flow information. To address this problem, this study develops a long-DOF full-field optical angiography imaging system and proposes a novel multi-focus image fusion scheme to expand the DOF. First, FFOA images with different focal lengths are acquired by the absorption intensity fluctuation modulation effect. Second, an image fusion scheme based on gradient feature detection in a nonsubsampled contourlet transform domain is developed to capture focus features from FFOA images and synthesize an all-focused image. Specifically, FFOA images are decomposed by NSCT into coefficients and low-frequency difference images; thereafter, two gradient feature detection-based fusion rules are used to select the pre-fused coefficients. The experimental results of both phantom and animal cases show that the proposed fusion method can effectively extend the DOF and address practical FFOA image defocusing problems. The fused FFOA image can provide a more comprehensive description of blood information than a single FFOA image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foggy images suffer from severe halo disturbances, low brightness and low contrast, etc. In this paper, to solve these problems, we propose a foggy image defogging method. First, the nonSubsampled contour transform (NSCT) is employed in this method to partition the image into low and high frequency elements. In order to enhance the preservation of complex information, the Retinex approach utilises a bootstrap filter instead of a Gaussian filter. The denoising method entails the application of a threshold to the high-frequency sub-band pictures. This involves boosting coefficients that surpass the threshold and attenuating coefficients that are below it. The ultimate image is recreated following dehazing by employing the inverse transformation of NSCT. Then, the grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm is employed to optimise the regularisation factor of the kernel in the guided filter, hence improving the defogging process. Finally, through extensive experiments, our proposed method outperforms recent approachs under plenty of metrics in terms of visual quality. The method effectively reduces halo aberrations, preserves intricate details, and significantly enhances picture sharpness by reducing atmospheric haze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In radiography, an antiscatter grid is a well-known device for eliminating unexpected x-ray scatter. We investigate a new stationary grid artifact suppression method based on a nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) incorporated with Gaussian band-pass filtering. The proposed method has an advantage that extracts the Moiré components while minimizing the loss of image information and apply the prior information of Moiré component positions in multi-decomposition sub-band images. We implemented the proposed algorithm and performed a simulation and an experiment to demonstrate its viability. We did this experiment using an x-ray tube (M-113T, Varian, focal spot size: 0.1 mm), a flat-panel detector (ROSE-M Sensor, Aspenstate, pixel dimension: 3032 × 3800 pixels, pixel size: 0.076 mm), and carbon graphite-interspaced grids (JPI Healthcare, 18 cm × 24 cm, line density: 103 LP/inch and 150 LP/inch, ratio: 5:1, focal distance: 65 cm). Our results indicate that the proposed method successfully suppressed grid artifacts by reducing them without either reducing the spatial resolution or causing negative side effects. Consequently, we anticipate that the proposed method can improve image acquisition in a stationary grid x-ray system as well as in extended x-ray imaging.

Full-field optical angiography (FFOA) has considerable potential for clinical applications in the prevention and diagnosis of various diseases. However, owing to the limited depth of focus attainable using optical lenses, only information about blood flow in the plane within the depth of field can be acquired using existing FFOA imaging techniques, resulting in partially unclear images. To produce fully focused FFOA images, an FFOA image fusion method based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform and contrast spatial frequency is proposed. Firstly, an imaging system is constructed, and the FFOA images are acquired by intensity-fluctuation modulation effect. Secondly, we decompose the source images into low-pass and bandpass images by performing nonsubsampled contourlet transform. A sparse representation-based rule is introduced to fuse the lowpass images to effectively retain the useful energy information. Meanwhile, a contrast spatial frequency rule is proposed to fuse bandpass images, which considers the neighborhood correlation and gradient relationships of pixels. Finally, the fully focused image is produced by reconstruction. The proposed method significantly expands the range of focus of optical angiography and can be effectively extended to public multi-focused datasets. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method outperformed some state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Full-field optical angiography (FFOA) has considerable potential for clinical applications in the prevention and diagnosis of various diseases. However, owing to the limited depth of focus attainable using optical lenses, only information about blood flow in the plane within the depth of field can be acquired using existing FFOA imaging techniques, resulting in partially unclear images. To produce fully focused FFOA images, an FFOA image fusion method based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform and contrast spatial frequency is proposed. Firstly, an imaging system is constructed, and the FFOA images are acquired by intensity-fluctuation modulation effect. Secondly, we decompose the source images into low-pass and bandpass images by performing nonsubsampled contourlet transform. A sparse representation-based rule is introduced to fuse the lowpass images to effectively retain the useful energy information. Meanwhile, a contrast spatial frequency rule is proposed to fuse bandpass images, which considers the neighborhood correlation and gradient relationships of pixels. Finally, the fully focused image is produced by reconstruction. The proposed method significantly expands the range of focus of optical angiography and can be effectively extended to public multi-focused datasets. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method outperformed some state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

In order to avoid the noise diffusion and amplification caused by traditional dehazing algorithms, a single image haze removal algorithm based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (HRNSCT) is proposed. The HRNSCT removes haze only from the low-frequency components and suppresses noise in the high-frequency components of hazy images, preventing noise amplification caused by traditional dehazing algorithms. First, the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) is used to decompose each channel of a hazy and noisy color image into low-frequency sub-band and high-frequency direction sub-bands. Second, according to the low-frequency sub-bands of the three channels, the color attenuation prior and dark channel prior are combined to estimate the transmission map, and use the transmission map to dehaze the low frequency sub-bands. Then, to achieve the noise suppression and details enhancement of the dehazed image, the high-frequency direction sub-bands of the three channels are shrunk, and those shrunk sub-bands are enhanced according to the transmission map. Finally, the nonsubsampled contourlet inverse transform is performed on the dehazed low-frequency sub-bands and enhanced high-frequency sub-bands to reconstruct the dehazed and noise-suppressed image. The experimental results show that the HRNSCT provides excellent haze removal and noise suppression performance and prevents noise amplification during dehazing, making it well suited for removing haze from noisy images.

Although the traditional image fusion method can obtain rich image results, obvious artificial noise and artifacts are often present in the resulting image. Fusion algorithms based on neural networks can avoid the shortcomings of traditional methods, but they are more complex and less flexible. In this study, we proposed a fusion method using the deep residual neural network ResNet152, which can not only effectively suppress artificial noise but also preserve the edge details of the image and improve the efficiency of the neural network. The proposed method is characterized by a multiscale transformation of an infrared image and visible light image in the optimized nonsubsampled contourlet transformation domain, and the deep residual neural network ResNet152 is used to extract the deep features of the low-pass component to guide the fusion of the low-pass component. The bandpass component is fused by taking the modulus maximum. This method can fully retain the global features and structural information of the source image in the result image. Compared to existing fusion methods using public test image sets, the experimental results show that on a subjective level, the fusion method creates sharper depth edges and fewer noise artifacts than traditional fusion methods. From an objective perspective, the average value for the results of the evaluation function is greater than that of other fusion methods.

The aircraft environmental control system (AECS) plays a vital role in the normal operation of an airplane; thus, performance degradation of the AECS may result in failure and even catastrophic consequences. Because performance degradation is inevitable, performance degradation assessment is critical to provide information for appropriate maintenance actions. This paper proposed an integrated framework for performance degradation assessment of AECS by introducing the visual cognition theory into the specific method. First, an observer is used to generate a residual error, which contains degradation information of the AECS. Second, the generated residual error is transformed into a two-dimensional image based on a permutation method. Third, inspired by the multichannel characteristic (MCC), the transformed image is decomposed into several subbands based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NCST) for multiscale and multidirectional feature extraction, thus capturing the precise characteristics of degradation. Then, inspired by the manifold sensing characteristic (MSC), the manifold space is established based on diffusion maps (DM) to reveal the intrinsic evolutionary law of health degradation. Finally, the geodesic distance is employed to represent the deviation between the current state and health baseline. As a health indicator, the confidence value (CV), which is derived from the geodesic distance, is capable of representing the degradation trend of the AECS. The whole process of degradation can be tracked in real time based on the proposed method. An AECS simulation model was established in MATLAB/Simulink, and two typical faults were introduced. The results based on simulation data demonstrate that the proposed assessment method can effectively reflect the degradation process of the AECS and the constructed health indicator is reasonable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung Cancer is one among deadly disease since it is aggressive in nature as well as deferred detections at advanced stages. The survival rate due to lung cancer mainly relies on prompt detection which is regarded as major challenge. Former approaches such as iW-Net based segmentation and Enhanced Inception-Residual Convolutional Neural Network (EIRCNN) based lung nodule detection are utilized for lung cancer detection. Though traditional iW-Net architecture outperforms in an improved way for CT medical images with challenging datasets through extensive experimentations, certain aspects are lagging pertaining to architecture. Yet further examination is required for optimal features selection in Lung nodule detection. To mitigate these issues, combination of Improved Stacked Autoencoder and Enhanced Pre-Activation Residual Convolutional Neural Network (EPARCNN) is greatly utilized for pulmonary nodule detection. Also robust image enhancement in lung CT and X-ray is achieved by suggesting Fuzzy Normalized Gamma-Corrected Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (FNGCCLAHE) with Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) and segmentation through Sub-Intensity range-based Pulse-Coupled Neural Network (SIPCNN). LIDC-IDRI and X-ray image datasets are utilized for assessing suggested CoISAE-PARCNN system with respect to factors such as precision, recall, f-measure, Peak Signal-o-Noise Ratio (PSNR), time, error rate and accuracy. It is thereby validated through experimental outcomes that the proposed system outperforms well in contrary to various prevailing approaches like LOG, Fast-RCNN, EWRCNN and EIRCNN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image fusion method based on sparse representation in the single‐scale image domain has produced better fusion results than the classic methods based on multi‐scale analysis nowadays. However, due to the limited number of dictionary atoms, it is difficult to provide an accurate description for image details in the sparse‐representation‐based image fusion methods, and it requires a lot of time. A novel dictionary is constructed with non‐subsampled contourlet transform and sparse representation by using the proposed simultaneous strategy. Then the novel dictionary could combine the sparsity attribute of the learning dictionary with a multi‐scale feature of non‐subsampled contourlet transform. Moreover, the simultaneous strategy is combined with this novel dictionary so that sparse coefficients can be represented with the same dictionary atoms and thus they can be compared in a reasonable and accurate way. Finally, the image fusion method along with this novel dictionary is proposed and named non‐subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT)–simultaneous sparse representation (SSR). Experimental results show that the proposed fusion method NSCT–SSR, with its more excellent fusion effect and better anti‐noise capability, outperforms the existing fusion methods, which are based on both multi‐scale domain and sparse representation in the single‐scale image domain.

Remote sensing image fusion is very important for playing the advantages of a variety of remote sensing data. However, remote sensing image fusion is large in computing capacity and time consuming. In this paper, in order to fuse remote sensing images accurately and quickly, a parallel fusion algorithm of remote sensing image based on NSCT (nonsubsampled contourlet transform) is proposed. In the method, two important kinds of remote sensing image, multispectral image and panchromatic image are used, and the advantages of parallel computing in high performance computing and the advantages of NSCT in information processing are combined. In the method, based on parallel computing, some processes with large amount of calculation including IHS (Intensity, Hue, Saturation) transform, NSCT, inverse NSCT, inverse IHS transform, etc., are done. To realize the method, multispectral image is processed with IHS transform, and the three components, I, H, and S are gotten. The component I and the panchromatic image are decomposed with NSCT. The obtained low frequency components of NSCT are fused with the fusion rule based on the neighborhood energy feature matching, and the obtained high frequency components are fused with the fusion rule based on the subregion variance. Then the low frequency components and the high frequency components after fusion are processed with the inverse NSCT, and the fused component is gotten. Finally, the fused component, the component H and the component S are processed with the inverse IHS transform, and the fusion image is obtained. The experiment results show that the proposed method can get better fusion results and faster computing speed for multispectral image and panchromatic image.

Image fusion aims at aggregating the redundant and complementary information in multiple original images, the most challenging aspect is to design robust features and discriminant model, which enhances saliency information in the fused image. To address this issue, the authors develop a novel image fusion algorithm for preserving the invariant knowledge of the multimodal image. Specifically, they formulate a novel unified architecture based on non‐subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). Their method introduces Quadtree decomposition and Bezier interpolation to extract crucial infrared features. Furthermore, they propose a saliency advertising phase congruency‐based rule and local Laplacian energy‐based rule for low‐ and high‐pass sub‐bands fusion, respectively. In this approach, the fusion image could not only combine the local and global features of the source image to avoid smoothing the edge of the target, but also retain the minor scales details and resists the interference noise of the multi‐modal image. Both objective assessments and subjective visions of experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm performs competitively in both objective evaluation criteria and visual quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operation mode of a single strip provides incomplete side-scan sonar image in a specific environment and range, resulting in the overlapping area between adjacent strips often with imperfect detection information or inaccurate target contour. In this paper, a sum-modified Laplacian energy filtering (SMLF) and improved dual-channel pulse coupled neural network (IDPCNN) are proposed for image fusion of side-scan sonar in the domain of nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). Among them, SMLF energy is applied to extract the fusion coefficients of the low frequency sub-band, which combines the characteristics of energy information, human visual contrast, and guided filtering to eliminate the pseudo contour effect of block flow. In addition, the IDPCNN model, which utilizes the average gradient, soft limit function, and novel sum-modified Laplacian (NSML) to adaptively represent the corresponding excitation parameters, is applied to improve the depth and activity of pulse ignition, so as to quickly and accurately select the image coefficients of the high frequency sub-band. The experimental results show that the proposed method displays fine geomorphic information and clear target contour in the overlapping area of adjacent strips. The objective index values are generally optimal, which reflect the information of image edge, clarity, and overall similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine raft aquaculture (MFA) plays an important role in the marine economy and ecosystem. With the characteristics of covering a large area and being sparsely distributed in sea area, MFA monitoring suffers from the low efficiency of field survey and poor data of optical satellite imagery. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery is currently considered to be an effective data source, while the state-of-the-art methods require manual parameter tuning under the guidance of professional experience. To preclude the limitation, this paper proposes a segmentation network combined with nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) to extract MFA areas using Sentinel-1 images. The proposed method is highlighted by several improvements based on the feature analysis of MFA. First, the NSCT was applied to enhance the contour and orientation features. Second, multiscale and asymmetric convolutions were introduced to fit the multisize and strip-like features more effectively. Third, both channel and spatial attention modules were adopted in the network architecture to overcome the problems of boundary fuzziness and area incompleteness. Experiments showed that the method can effectively extract marine raft culture areas. Although further research is needed to overcome the problem of interference caused by excessive waves, this paper provides a promising approach for periodical monitoring MFA in a large area with high efficiency and acceptable accuracy.

The operation mode of a single strip provides incomplete side-scan sonar image in a specific environment and range, resulting in the overlapping area between adjacent strips often with imperfect detection information or inaccurate target contour. In this paper, a sum-modified Laplacian energy filtering (SMLF) and improved dual-channel pulse coupled neural network (IDPCNN) are proposed for image fusion of side-scan sonar in the domain of nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). Among them, SMLF energy is applied to extract the fusion coefficients of the low frequency sub-band, which combines the characteristics of energy information, human visual contrast, and guided filtering to eliminate the pseudo contour effect of block flow. In addition, the IDPCNN model, which utilizes the average gradient, soft limit function, and novel sum-modified Laplacian (NSML) to adaptively represent the corresponding excitation parameters, is applied to improve the depth and activity of pulse ignition, so as to quickly and accurately select the image coefficients of the high frequency sub-band. The experimental results show that the proposed method displays fine geomorphic information and clear target contour in the overlapping area of adjacent strips. The objective index values are generally optimal, which reflect the information of image edge, clarity, and overall similarity.

Speckle noise reduction is an important preprocessing stage for ultrasound medical image processing. In this paper, a despeckling algorithm is proposed based on non‐subsampled contourlet transform. This transform has the property of high directionality, anisotropy and translation invariance, which can be controlled by non‐subsampled filter banks. This study aims to denoise the speckle noise in ultrasound images using adaptive binary morphological operations, in order to preserve edges, contours and textures. In morphological operations, structural element plays an important role for image enhancement. In this work, different shapes of structural element have been analysed and filtering parameters have been changed adaptively depending on the nature of the image and the amount of noise in the image. Experimental results of proposed method for natural images, Field II simulated images and real ultrasound images, show that the proposed method is able to preserve edges and image structural details compared with existing methods.

Breast cancer is a common disease for women and various techniques have been used to detect the breast cancer. The mammogram images are noise, low contrast and blur due to limitations of the X-ray hardware system. So, we should enhance the mammogram images for radiologist observation. To attain this, we strongly recognize that the digital mammography is a truthful technique with a new method and also it can easily identify the breast cancer at the very early stage before any symptoms are shown. In this paper, we propose NonSubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) method for enhancing the mammogram images and the comparison between 2-D HAAR Discrete Wavelet Transform and Contourlet Transform. The NSCT extracts the shift-invariant multi-scale, multi-direction and the geometric information of mammogram images which is used to distinguish noise from weak edges than existing transformations.

In this paper, an efficient image encryption technique using beta chaotic map, nonsubsampled contourlet transform, and genetic algorithm is proposed. Initially, the nonsubsampled contourlet transform is utilized to decompose the input image into subbands. The beta chaotic map is used to develop pseudo-random key that encrypts the coefficients of subbands. However, it requires certain parameters to encrypt these coefficients. A multiobjective fitness function for genetic algorithm is designed to find the optimal parameter of beta chaotic map. The inverse of nonsubsampled contourlet transform is performed to obtain a ciphered image. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with recently developed well-known meta-heuristic based image encryption techniques. Experimental results reveal that the proposed technique provides better computational speed and high encryption intensity. The comparative analyses show effectiveness of the proposed image encryption technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Document images of various scripts must be identified and processed in today's international environment. As the front-end technology of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), script identification is an indispensable part of automatic document image analysis. Aiming at the nature of rich texture features of document images, a 3-level Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) was used to extract 30- dimensional texture features in this paper. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier were used for classification. A total of 10,000 document images in 10 kinds of Central Asian scripts--Arabic, Russian, Tibetan, Chinese, Uyghur, English, Mongolian, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Turkish--were classified. The identification efficiency of SVM and KNN was analyzed and compared, with the result that the SVM classifier obtained 99.5% average accuracy, a higher accuracy than KNN, during the experiment. The validity of the proposed method was proved by comparing the Wavelet Transforms (WT) and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) of these two script-identification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An improved image enhancement approach via nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) is proposed in this article. We constructed a geometric image transform by combining nonsubsampled directional filter banks and a nonlinear mapping function. Here, the NSCT of the input image is first decomposed for L-levels and its noise standard deviation is estimated. It is followed by calculating the noise variance and threshold calculation, and computing the magnitude of the corresponding coefficients in all directional subbands. Then, the nonlinear mapping function is used to modify the NSCT coefficients for each directional subband, which keeps the coefficients of strong edges, amplifies the coefficients of weak edges, and zeros the noise coefficients. Finally, the enhanced image is reconstructed from the modified NSCT coefficients. Three experiments are carried out respectively on images from subjective vision quality and objective evaluation measures. The first experiment is the algorithm performed on images. The subsequent experiments are the information entropy and spatial frequency. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can gain better performance in enhancing the low-contrast parts of an image while keeping its clear edges.

Traditional image change detection based on a non-subsampled contourlet transform always ignores the neighborhood information's relationship to the non-subsampled contourlet coefficients, and the detection results are susceptible to noise interference. To address these disadvantages, we propose a denoising method based on the non-subsampled contourlet transform domain that uses the Hidden Markov Tree model (NSCT-HMT) for change detection of remote sensing images. First, the ENVI software is used to calibrate the original remote sensing images. After that, the mean-ratio operation is adopted to obtain the difference image that will be denoised by the NSCT-HMT model. Then, using the Fuzzy Local Information C-means (FLICM) algorithm, the difference image is divided into the change area and unchanged area. The proposed algorithm is applied to a real remote sensing data set. The application results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively suppress clutter noise, and retain more detailed information from the original images. The proposed algorithm has higher detection accuracy than the Markov Random Field-Fuzzy C-means (MRF-FCM), the non-subsampled contourlet transform-Fuzzy C-means clustering (NSCT-FCM), the pointwise approach and graph theory (PA-GT), and the Principal Component Analysis-Nonlocal Means (PCA-NLM) denosing algorithm. Finally, the five algorithms are used to detect the southern boundary of the Gurbantunggut Desert in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, and the results show that the proposed algorithm has the best effect on real remote sensing image change detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image registration is a fundamental task used in image processing to match two or more images taken at different times, from different sensors or from different viewpoints. The objective is to find in a huge search space of geometric transformations, an acceptable accurate solution in a reasonable time to provide better registered images. Exhaustive search is computationally expensive and the computational cost increases exponentially with the number of transformation parameters and the size of the data set. In this work, we present an efficient image registration algorithm that uses genetic algorithms within a multi-resolution framework based on the Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT). An adaptable genetic algorithm for registration is adopted in order to minimize the search space. This approach is used within a hybrid scheme applying the two techniques fitness sharing and elitism. Two NSCT based methods are proposed for registration. A comparative study is established between these methods and a wavelet based one. Because the NSCT is a shift-invariant multidirectional transform, the second method is adopted for its search speeding up property. Simulation results clearly show that both proposed techniques are really promising methods for image registration compared to the wavelet approach, while the second technique has led to the best performance results of all. Moreover, to demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods, these registration techniques have been successfully applied to register SPOT, IKONOS and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The algorithm has been shown to work perfectly well for multi-temporal satellite images as well, even in the presence of noise.

Stripe artifacts, caused by high-absorption or high-scattering structures in the illumination light path, are a common drawback in both unidirectional and multidirectional light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM), significantly deteriorating image quality. To circumvent this problem, we present an effective multidirectional stripe remover (MDSR) method based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT), which can be used for both unidirectional and multidirectional LSFM. In MDSR, a fast Fourier transform (FFT) filter is designed in the NSCT domain to shrink the stripe components and eliminate the noise. Benefiting from the properties of being multiscale and multidirectional, MDSR succeeds in eliminating stripe artifacts in both unidirectional and multidirectional LSFM. To validate the method, MDSR has been tested on images from a custom-made unidirectional LSFM system and a commercial multidirectional LSFM system, clearly demonstrating that MDSR effectively removes most of the stripe artifacts. Moreover, we performed a comparative experiment with the variational stationary noise remover and the wavelet-FFT methods and quantitatively analyzed the results with a peak signal-to-noise ratio, showing an improved noise removal when using the MDSR method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater image enhancement has received considerable attention in last decades, due to the nature of poor visibility and low contrast of underwater images. In this paper, we propose a new automatic underwater image enhancement algorithm, which combines nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain enhancement techniques with the mechanism of the human visual system (HVS). We apply the multiscale retinex algorithm based on the HVS into NSCT domain in order to eliminate the non-uniform illumination, and adopt the threshold denoising technique to suppress underwater noise. Our proposed algorithm incorporates the luminance masking and contrast masking characteristics of the HVS into NSCT domain to yield the new HVS-based NSCT. Moreover, we define two nonlinear mapping functions. The first one is used to manipulate the HVS-based NSCT contrast coefficients to enhance the edges. The second one is a gain function which modifies the lowpass subband coefficients to adjust the global dynamic range. As a result, our algorithm can achieve contrast enhancement, image denoising and edge sharpening automatically and simultaneously. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed algorithm has better enhancement performance than state-of-the-art algorithms both in subjective evaluation and quantitative assessment. In addition, our algorithm can automatically achieve underwater image enhancement without any parameter tuning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast cancer is a common disease for women and various techniques have been used to detect the breast cancer. The mammogram images are noise, low contrast and blur due to limitations of the X-ray hardware system. So, we should enhance the mammogram images for radiologist observation. To attain this, we strongly recognize that the digital mammography is a truthful technique with a new method and also it can easily identify the breast cancer at the very early stage before any symptoms are shown. In this paper, we propose NonSubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) method for enhancing the mammogram images and the comparison between 2-D HAAR Discrete Wavelet Transform and Contourlet Transform. The NSCT extracts the shift-invariant multi-scale, multi-direction and the geometric information of mammogram images which is used to distinguish noise from weak edges than existing transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fusion of CT and MR images allows simultaneous visualization of details of bony anatomy provided by CT image and details of soft tissue anatomy provided by MR image. This helps the radiologist for the precise diagnosis of disease and for more effective interventional treatment procedures. This paper aims at designing an effective CT and MR image fusion method. In the proposed method, first source images are decomposed by using nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) which is a shift-invariant, multiresolution and multidirection image decomposition transform. Maximum entropy of square of the coefficients with in a local window is used for low-frequency sub-band coefficient selection. Maximum weighted sum-modified Laplacian is used for high-frequency sub-bands coefficient selection. Finally fused image is obtained through inverse NSCT. CT and MR images of different cases have been used to test the proposed method and results are compared with those of the other conventional image fusion methods. Both visual analysis and quantitative evaluation of experimental results shows the superiority of proposed method as compared to other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes two different methods for fusing multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) satellite images using the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). The NSCT decomposes the images into several directional subbands at flexible resolutions. The finer subbands of the MS image decomposition, which represent the high frequency details, are modified with the subbands from PAN image. The inverse transform gives a high resolution MS representation of the given low resolution MS image. The paper also proposes the use of the parameters mean structural similarity index measure (MSSIM) and edge stability mean square error (ESMSE) to measure the quality of the fused image, in addition to standard parameters like correlation coefficient, PSNR, RASE and ERGAS. Experiments show that the proposed methods outperform standard fusion techniques in terms of both visual quality and quantitative error measures. The fused images obtained using the proposed methods show good structural similarity and better edge stability as the contourlet transform very well extracts the oriented edge details from the high resolution PAN image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An novel edge detection approach is proposed. Firstly, the nonsubsampled contourlet transform is used to decompose the original image into low frequency approximation image and the high frequency subbands. Then, because of nonsubsampled contourlet transform shift-invariance, the original image corresponding gradient magnitude is redefined in every scale. Finally, different scales gradient is synthesized into the image dege. The experimental results of edge detection for several test images are provided to demonstrate the approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Geometric attack is known as one of the most difficult attacks to resist, for it can desynchronize the location of the watermark and hence causes incorrect watermark detection. It is a challenging work to design a robust image watermarking scheme against geometric attacks. Based on the support vector machine (SVM) and Gaussian–Hermite moments (GHMs), we propose a robust image watermarking algorithm in nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain with good visual quality and reasonable resistance toward geometric attacks in this paper. Firstly, the NSCT is performed on original host image, and corresponding low-pass subband is selected for embedding watermark. Then, the selected low-pass subband is divided into small blocks. Finally, the digital watermark is embedded into host image by modulating adaptively the NSCT coefficients in small block. The main steps of digital watermark detecting procedure include: (1) some low-order Gaussian–Hermite moments of training image are computed, which are regarded as the effective feature vectors; (2) the appropriate kernel function is selected for training, and a SVM training model can be obtained; (3) the watermarked image is corrected with the well trained SVM model; (4) the digital watermark is extracted from the corrected watermarked image. Experimental results show that the proposed image watermarking is not only invisible and robust against common image processing operations such as filtering, noise adding, JPEG compression, etc., but also robust against the geometric attacks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, an improved image denoising method based on a nonlinear thresholding function with adaptive bayes threshold in Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) domain. In overcoming the shortcomings of the same threshold, the noise deviation of the different sub-band are estimated based on the coefficients of different directional and level sub-bands in NSCT domain, and the thresholds of every sub-band is estimated by Bayesian threshold estimation method. After choosing the thresholds, a nonlinear thresholding function was chosen to overcome the shortcomings of the soft and the hard thresholding function. The simulation results show that the proposed method in this paper can remove Gaussian white noise more effectively, and get a higher PSNR value and keep image texture and detail information more clearly, which also has a better visual effect. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Image registration is a fundamental task used in image processing to match two or more images taken at different times, from different sensors or from different viewpoints. The objective is to find in a huge search space of geometric transformations, an acceptable accurate solution in a reasonable time to provide better registered images. Exhaustive search is computationally expensive and the computational cost increases exponentially with the number of transformation parameters and the size of the data set. In this work, we present an efficient image registration algorithm that uses genetic algorithms within a multi-resolution framework based on the Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT). An adaptable genetic algorithm for registration is adopted in order to minimize the search space. This approach is used within a hybrid scheme applying the two techniques fitness sharing and elitism. Two NSCT based methods are proposed for registration. A comparative study is established between these methods and a wavelet based one. Because the NSCT is a shift-invariant multidirectional transform, the second method is adopted for its search speeding up property. Simulation results clearly show that both proposed techniques are really promising methods for image registration compared to the wavelet approach, while the second technique has led to the best performance results of all. Moreover, to demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods, these registration techniques have been successfully applied to register SPOT, IKONOS and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The algorithm has been shown to work perfectly well for multi-temporal satellite images as well, even in the presence of noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aimed at the fusion of infrared and visual images, and their application demands, a new image fusion method was proposed based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform and estimation theory. Firstly, the nonsubsampled contourlet transform was employed to decompose the source images into the low frequency subband coefficient and bandpass directional subband coefficients. Then, for the bandpass directional subband coefficients, the detail coefficients were modeled by the Gaussian mixture distributions and the EM algorithm was used in conjunction with the model to develop an iterative fusion procedure to estimate the model parameters and to produce the fused coefficients; for the fusion of the approximate subband coefficients, the rule was employed based on the energy of the pixel neighboring region. Finally, the fused image was obtained by applying the inverse nonsubsampled contourlet transform. The experimental results showed that the fusion scheme is effective and the fused image is better than that of using the wavelet transform and the contourlet transform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coupled neural P (CNP) systems are recently developed distributed and parallel computing models that are abstracted by the mechanisms of coupled and spiking neurons. CNP systems differ from spiking neural P (SNP) systems in two main ways, namely the utilization of three data units, and a coupled firing and dynamic threshold mechanism for neurons. This paper focuses on the application of CNP systems to solve multi-focus image fusion problems, and proposes a novel image fusion approach based on CNP systems. Based on two CNP systems with local topology, a multi-focus image fusion framework in the non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain is developed, where the two CNP systems are utilized to control the fusion of low-frequency coefficients in the NSCT domain. The proposed fusion approach is evaluated on an open data set of 19 multi-focus images based on five fusion quality indices, and compared to 11 state-of-the-art fusion approaches. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed fusion approach in terms of visual quality and fusion performance. • We propose a coupled neural P (CNP) system with local topology. • We develop a novel image fusion framework based on two CNP systems in NSCT domain for multi-focus images. • We propose a fusion rule based on CNP systems for low-frequency coefficients in NSCT domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine raft aquaculture (MFA) plays an important role in the marine economy and ecosystem. With the characteristics of covering a large area and being sparsely distributed in sea area, MFA monitoring suffers from the low efficiency of field survey and poor data of optical satellite imagery. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery is currently considered to be an effective data source, while the state-of-the-art methods require manual parameter tuning under the guidance of professional experience. To preclude the limitation, this paper proposes a segmentation network combined with nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) to extract MFA areas using Sentinel-1 images. The proposed method is highlighted by several improvements based on the feature analysis of MFA. First, the NSCT was applied to enhance the contour and orientation features. Second, multiscale and asymmetric convolutions were introduced to fit the multisize and strip-like features more effectively. Third, both channel and spatial attention modules were adopted in the network architecture to overcome the problems of boundary fuzziness and area incompleteness. Experiments showed that the method can effectively extract marine raft culture areas. Although further research is needed to overcome the problem of interference caused by excessive waves, this paper provides a promising approach for periodical monitoring MFA in a large area with high efficiency and acceptable accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]