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Image denoising is a challenging inverse problem due to complex scenes and information loss. Recently, various methods have been considered to solve this problem by building a well-designed convolutional neural network (CNN) or introducing some hand-designed image priors. Different from previous works, we investigate a new framework for image denoising, which integrates edge detection, edge guidance, and image denoising into an end-to-end CNN model. To achieve this goal, we propose a multilevel edge features guided network (MLEFGN). First, we build an edge reconstruction network (Edge-Net) to directly predict clear edges from the noisy image. Then, the Edge-Net is embedded as part of the model to provide edge priors, and a dual-path network is applied to extract the image and edge features, respectively. Finally, we introduce a multilevel edge features guidance mechanism for image denoising. To the best of our knowledge, the Edge-Net is the first CNN model specially designed to reconstruct image edges from the noisy image, which shows good accuracy and robustness on natural images. Extensive experiments clearly illustrate that our MLEFGN achieves favorable performance against other methods and plenty of ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Edge-Net and MLEFGN. The code is available at https://github.com/MIVRC/MLEFGN-PyTorch .

Image stitching aims to generate a natural seamless high-resolution panoramic image free of distortions or artifacts as fast as possible. In this article, we propose a new seam cutting strategy based on superpixels for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) image stitching. Explicitly, we decompose the issue into three steps: image registration, seam cutting, and image blending. First, we employ adaptive as-natural-as-possible (AANAP) warps for registration, obtaining two aligned images in the same coordinate system. Then, we propose a novel superpixel-based energy function that integrates color difference, gradient difference, and texture complexity information to search a perceptually optimal seam located in continuous areas with high similarity. We apply the graph cut algorithm to solve the problem and thereby conceal artifacts in the overlapping area. Finally, we utilize a superpixel-based color blending approach to eliminate visible seams and achieve natural color transitions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively and efficiently realize seamless stitching, and is superior to several state-of-the-art methods in UAV image stitching.

Low-light image enhancement based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has revealed prominent performance in recent years. However, it is still a challenging task since the underexposed regions and details are always imperceptible. Moreover, deep learning models are always accompanied by complex structures and enormous computational burden, which hinders their deployment on mobile devices. To remedy these issues, in this paper, we present a lightweight and efficient Luminance-aware Pyramid Network (LPNet) to reconstruct normal-light images in a coarse-to-fine strategy. The architecture is comprised of two coarse feature extraction branches and a luminance-aware refinement branch with an auxiliary subnet learning the luminance map of the input and target images. Besides, we propose a multi-scale contrast feature block (MSCFB) that involves channel split, channel shuffle strategies, and contrast attention mechanism. MSCFB is the essential component of our network, which achieves an excellent balance between image quality and model size. In this way, our method can not only brighten up low-light images with rich details and high contrast but also significantly ameliorate the execution speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LPNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

In this paper, we investigate the challenging task of removing haze from a single natural image. The analysis on the haze formation model shows that the atmospheric veil has much less relevance to chrominance than luminance, which motivates us to neglect the haze in the chrominance channel and concentrate on the luminance channel in the dehazing process. Besides, the experimental study illustrates that the YUV color space is most suitable for image dehazing. Accordingly, a variational model is proposed in the Y channel of the YUV color space by combining the reformulation of the haze model and the two effective priors. As we mainly focus on the Y channel, most of the chrominance information of the image is preserved after dehazing. The numerical procedure based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) scheme is presented to obtain the optimal solution. Extensive experimental results on real-world hazy images and synthetic dataset demonstrate clearly that our method can unveil the details and recover vivid color information, which is competitive among many existing dehazing algorithms. Further experiments show that our model also can be applied for image enhancement.

Interference between the grids of the camera sensor and the screen cause moire patterns to always appear on photographs captured from a screen, significantly affecting people’s ability to review images. We propose a novel method to remove such a screen moire pattern from a single image. We characterize the degraded image as a composition of two layers: the latent layer and the moire pattern layer. Because the screen moire pattern is global and content-independent, we regard it as a group of sublayers , and we find that each sublayer after the shear transformation has a low-rank property . Combined with the piecewise constant feature of the latent layer, a convex model is proposed to solve the demoireing problem. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate its feasibility and efficiency.

The task of single image super-resolution (SISR) is a highly ill-posed inverse problem since reconstructing the high-frequency details from a low-resolution image is challenging. Most previous CNN-based super-resolution (SR) methods tend to directly learn the mapping from the low-resolution image to the high-resolution image through some complex convolutional neural networks. However, the method of blindly increasing the depth of the network is not the best choice because the performance improvement of such methods is marginal but the computational cost is huge. A more efficient method is to integrate the image prior knowledge into the model to assist the image reconstruction. Indeed, the soft-edge has been widely applied in many computer vision tasks as the role of an important image feature. In this paper, we propose a Soft-edge assisted Network (SeaNet) to reconstruct the high-quality SR image with the help of image soft-edge. The proposed SeaNet consists of three sub-nets: a rough image reconstruction network (RIRN), a soft-edge reconstruction network (Edge-Net), and an image refinement network (IRN). The complete reconstruction process consists of two stages. In Stage-I, the rough SR feature maps and the SR soft-edge are reconstructed by the RIRN and Edge-Net, respectively. In Stage-II, the outputs of the previous stages are fused and then fed to the IRN for high-quality SR image reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that our SeaNet converges rapidly and achieves excellent performance under the assistance of image soft-edge. The code is available at https://gitlab.com/junchenglee/seanet-pytorch .

Blind deblurring has received considerable attention in recent years. However, state-of-the-art methods often fail to process saturated blurry images. The main reason is that pixels around saturated regions are not conforming to the commonly used linear blur model. Pioneer arts suggest excluding these pixels during the deblurring process, which sometimes simultaneously removes the informative edges around saturated regions and results in insufficient information for kernel estimation when large saturated regions exist. To address this problem, we introduce a new blur model to fit both saturated and unsaturated pixels, and all informative pixels can be considered during the deblurring process. Based on our model, we develop an effective maximum a posterior (MAP)-based optimization framework. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets and challenging real-world examples show that the proposed method performs favorably against existing methods.

Deblurring night blurry images is difficult, because the common-used blur model based on the linear convolution operation does not hold in this situation due to the influence of saturated pixels. In this paper, we propose a non-blind deblurring network (NBDN) to restore night blurry images. To mitigate the side effects brought by the pixels that violate the blur model, we develop a confidence estimation unit (CEU) to estimate a map which ensures smaller contributions of these pixels in the deconvolution steps which are optimized by the conjugate gradient (CG) method. Moreover, unlike the existing methods using manually tuned hyper-parameters in their frameworks, we propose a hyper-parameter estimation unit (HPEU) to adaptively estimate hyper-parameters for better image restoration. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms both quantitatively and qualitatively.

In this letter, we propose a fast and robust method for stitching overlapped images captured by the unmanned aerial vehicle. First, we apply the shape-preserving half-projective method to precisely and stably align a pair of partially overlapped input images. Then, an optimal stitching line is searched to remove ghosts caused by the moving objects in the overlapped area. We subsequently propose a color blending method to eliminate all the color inconsistencies in the prealigned image. In accordance with the color differences of the pixels on the optimal stitching seam, we utilize weighted value coordinate interpolation algorithms to compute accurate color changes for all the pixels in the target image. The calculated color changes are then added to the target image to remove the color inconsistency. Furthermore, we introduce the superpixel segmentation to divide the target image into a reduced number of superpixels, and we assign each superpixel the same color change value. Such a superpixel level operation can greatly reduce the computational complexity. Experiments show that our method is promising to achieve effective and efficient stitching results.

Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of female-specific cancer death. Tumor region segmentation plays a pivotal role in both the clinical analysis and treatment planning of cervical cancer. Due to the heterogeneity and low contrast of biomedical images, current state-of-the-art tumor segmentation approaches are facing the challenge of the insensitive detection of small lesion regions. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes an augmented multiscale network (AugMS-Net) based on 3D U-Net to automatically segment cervical Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) volumes. Since a multiscale strategy is considered one of the most promising algorithms to tackle small object recognition, we introduce a novel 3D module to explore more granular multiscale representations. Besides, we employ a deep multiscale supervision strategy to doubly supervise the side outputs hierarchically. To demonstrate the generalization of our model, we evaluated AugMS-Net on both a cervical dataset from MRI volumes and a liver dataset from Computerized Tomography (CT) volumes. Our proposed AugMS-Net shows superior performance over baseline models, yielding high accuracy while reducing the number of model parameters by nearly 20%. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Cassieyy/AugMS-Net.

Under stereo settings, the problem of image super-resolution (SR) and disparity estimation are interrelated that the result of each problem could help to solve the other. The effective exploitation of correspondence between different views facilitates the SR performance, while the high-resolution (HR) features with richer details benefit the correspondence estimation. According to this motivation, we propose a Stereo Super-Resolution and Disparity Estimation Feedback Network (SSRDE-FNet), which simultaneously handles the stereo image super-resolution and disparity estimation in a unified framework and interact them with each other to further improve their performance. Specifically, the SSRDE-FNet is composed of two dual recursive sub-networks for left and right views. Besides the cross-view information exploitation in the low-resolution (LR) space, HR representations produced by the SR process are utilized to perform HR disparity estimation with higher accuracy, through which the HR features can be aggregated to generate a finer SR result. Afterward, the proposed HR Disparity Information Feedback (HRDIF) mechanism delivers information carried by HR disparity back to previous layers to further refine the SR image reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and advancement of SSRDE-FNet.

Convolutional neural networks have been proven to be of great benefit for single-image super-resolution (SISR). However, previous works do not make full use of multi-scale features and ignore the inter-scale correlation between different upsampling factors, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Instead of blindly increasing the depth of the network, we are committed to mining image features and learning the inter-scale correlation between different upsampling factors. To achieve this, we propose a Multi-scale Dense Cross Network (MDCN), which achieves great performance with fewer parameters and less execution time. MDCN consists of multi-scale dense cross blocks (MDCBs), hierarchical feature distillation block (HFDB), and dynamic reconstruction block (DRB). Among them, MDCB aims to detect multi-scale features and maximize the use of image features flow at different scales, HFDB focuses on adaptively recalibrate channel-wise feature responses to achieve feature distillation, and DRB attempts to reconstruct SR images with different upsampling factors in a single model. It is worth noting that all these modules can run independently. It means that these modules can be selectively plugged into any CNN model to improve model performance. Extensive experiments show that MDCN achieves competitive results in SISR, especially in the reconstruction task with multiple upsampling factors. The code will be provided at https://github.com/MIVRC/MDCN-PyTorch., 15 pages, 15 figures

Exemplar-based colorization aims to add colors to a grayscale image guided by a content related reference im- age. Existing methods are either sensitive to the selection of reference images (content, position) or extremely time and resource consuming, which limits their practical applica- tion. To tackle these problems, we propose a deep exemplar colorization architecture inspired by the characteristics of stylization in feature extracting and blending. Our coarse- to-fine architecture consists of two parts: a fast transfer sub-net and a robust colorization sub-net. The transfer sub- net obtains a coarse chrominance map via matching basic feature statistics of the input pairs in a progressive way. The colorization sub-net refines the map to generate the final re- sults. The proposed end-to-end network can jointly learn faithful colorization with a related reference and plausible color prediction with unrelated reference. Extensive exper- imental validation demonstrates that our approach outper- forms the state-of-the-art methods in less time whether in exemplar-based colorization or image stylization tasks.

Blind deblurring methods are sensitive to outliers, such as saturated pixels and non-Gaussian noise. Even a small amount of outliers can dramatically degrade the quality of the estimated blur kernel, because the outliers are not conforming to the linear formation of the blurring process. Prior arts develop sophisticated edge-selecting steps or noise filtering pre-processing steps to deal with outliers (i.e. indirect approaches). However, these indirect approaches may fail when massive outliers are presented, since informative details may be polluted by outliers or erased during the pre-processing steps. To address these problems, this paper develops a simple yet effective Outlier Identifying and Discarding (OID) method, which alleviates limitations in existing Maximum A Posteriori (MAP)-based deblurring models when significant outliers are presented. Unlike previous indirect outlier processing methods, OID tackles outliers directly by explicitly identifying and discarding them, when updating both the latent image and the blur kernel during the deblurring process, where the outliers are detected by using the sparse and entropy-based modules. OID is easy to implement and extendable for non-blind restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of OID against recent works both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Panorama creation is still challenging in consumer-level photography because of varying conditions of image capturing. A long-standing problem is the presence of artifacts caused by structure inconsistent image transitions. Since it is difficult to achieve perfect alignment in unconstrained shooting environment especially with parallax and object movements, image composition becomes a crucial step to produce artifact-free stitching results. Current energy-based seam-cutting image composition approaches are limited by the hand-crafted features, which are not discriminative and adaptive enough to robustly create structure consistent image transitions. In this paper, we present the first end-to-end deep learning framework named Edge Guided Composition Network (EGCNet) for the composition stage in image stitching. We cast the whole composition stage as an image blending problem, and aims to regress the blending weights to seamlessly produce the stitched image. To better preserve the structure consistency, we exploit perceptual edges to guide the network with additional geometric prior. Specifically, we introduce a perceptual edge branch to integrate edge features into the model and propose two edge-aware losses for edge guidance. Meanwhile, we gathered a general-purpose dataset for image stitching training and evaluation (namely, RISD). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EGCNet produces plausible results with less running time, and outperforms traditional methods especially under the circumstances of parallax and object motions.

Convolutional neural networks have recently achieved great success in image super-resolution (SR). However, we notice an interesting phenomenon that these SR models are getting bigger, deeper, and more complex. Extensive models promote the development of SR, but the effectiveness, reproducibility and practical application prospects of these new models need further verification. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and accurate SR framework, named Super-Resolution Recursive Fractal Network (SRRFN). SRRFN introduces a flexible and diverse fractal module, which enables it to construct infinitely possible topological sub-structure through a simple component. We also introduce the recursive learning mechanism to maximize the use of model parameters. Extensive experiments show that our SRRFN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods with fewer parameters and less execution time. All code is available at https://github.com/MIVRC/SRRFN-PyTorch.

Blind image deblurring aims to recover sharp image from a blurred one while the blur kernel is unknown. To solve this ill-posed problem, a great amount of image priors have been explored and employed in this area. In this paper, we present a blind deblurring method based on Local Maximum Gradient (LMG) prior. Our work is inspired by the simple and intuitive observation that the maximum value of a local patch gradient will diminish after the blur process, which is proved to be true both mathematically and empirically. This inherent property of blur process helps us to establish a new energy function. By introducing an liner operator to compute the Local Maximum Gradient, together with an effective optimization scheme, our method can handle various specific scenarios. Extensive experimental results illustrate that our method is able to achieve favorable performance against state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real-world images.

Image colorization refers to a computer-assisted process that adds colors to grayscale images. It is a challenging task since there is usually no one-to-one correspondence between color and local texture. In this paper, we tackle this issue by exploiting weighted nonlocal self-similarity and local consistency constraints at the resolution of superpixels. Given a grayscale target image, we first select a color source image containing similar segments to target image and extract multi-level features of each superpixel in both images after superpixel segmentation. Then a set of color candidates for each target superpixel is selected by adopting a top-down feature matching scheme with confidence assignment. Finally, we propose a variational approach to determine the most appropriate color for each target superpixel from color candidates. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and show its superiority to other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our method can be easily extended to color transfer between two color images.

In this article, we propose a novel unsupervised change detection method for synthetic aperture radar SAR images. First, we generate a difference image as a weighted average of a log-ratio image and a mean-ratio image, which has the advantage of enhancing the information of changed regions and restraining the information of unchanged background regions simultaneously. Second, we propose a variational soft segmentation model based on non-differentiable curvelet regularization and L1-norm fidelity. Numerically, by using the split Bregman technique for curvelet regularization term and reformulating the L1-norm fidelity as weighted L2-norm fidelity, we get an effective algorithm in which each sub-problem has a closed-form solution. The numerical experiments and comparisons with several existing methods show that the proposed method is promising, with not only high robustness to non-Gaussian noise or outliers but also high change detection accuracy. Moreover, the proposed method is good at detecting fine-structured change areas. Especially, it outperforms other methods in preserving edge continuity and detecting curve-shaped changed areas.

Pansharpening is a process of acquiring a multi-spectral image with high spatial resolution by fusing a low resolution multi-spectral image with a corresponding high resolution panchromatic image. In this paper, a new pansharpening method based on the Bayesian theory is proposed. The algorithm is mainly based on three assumptions: 1) the geometric information contained in the pan-sharpened image is coincident with that contained in the panchromatic image; 2) the pan-sharpened image and the original multi-spectral image should share the same spectral information; and 3) in each pan-sharpened image channel, the neighboring pixels not around the edges are similar. We build our posterior probability model according to above-mentioned assumptions and solve it by the alternating direction method of multipliers. The experiments at reduced and full resolution show that the proposed method outperforms the other state-of-the-art pansharpening methods. Besides, we verify that the new algorithm is effective in preserving spectral and spatial information with high reliability. Further experiments also show that the proposed method can be successfully extended to hyper-spectral image fusion.

This paper reviews the first challenge on image dehazing (restoration of rich details in hazy image) with focus on proposed solutions and results. The challenge had 2 tracks. Track 1 employed the indoor images (using I-HAZE dataset), while Track 2 outdoor images (using O-HAZE dataset). The hazy images have been captured in presence of real haze, generated by professional haze machines. I-HAZE dataset contains 35 scenes that correspond to indoor domestic environments, with objects with different colors and specularities. O-HAZE contains 45 different outdoor scenes depicting the same visual content recorded in haze-free and hazy conditions, under the same illumination parameters. The dehazing process was learnable through provided pairs of haze-free and hazy train images. Each track had ~ 120 registered participants and 21 teams competed in the final testing phase. They gauge the state-of-the-art in image dehazing.

Topic detection on web videos can effectively help collecting users’ feedback and emotional tendency. With the features of relatively short, topic alignment and time synchronization, Danmaku comments can significantly extend the applications of topic detection. However, most of the current topic detection approaches fall short of considering the interior relation between adjacent time-steps which ignores the underlying temporal effects. To address this problem, we introduce a Joint Online Nonnegative Matrix Factorization model (JO-NMF) to detect latent topics with automatically exploiting Danmaku comments. Experimental results show great advantages of our proposed model on real-world Danmaku datasets. The results show our model outperforms baselines in topic detection with perplexity and RMSE for the noisy temporal data.

Recent studies have shown that deep neural networks can significantly improve the quality of single-image super-resolution. Current researches tend to use deeper convolutional neural networks to enhance performance. However, blindly increasing the depth of the network cannot ameliorate the network effectively. Worse still, with the depth of the network increases, more problems occurred in the training process and more training tricks are needed. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale residual network (MSRN) to fully exploit the image features, which outperform most of the state-of-the-art methods. Based on the residual block, we introduce convolution kernels of different sizes to adaptively detect the image features in different scales. Meanwhile, we let these features interact with each other to get the most efficacious image information, we call this structure Multi-scale Residual Block (MSRB). Furthermore, the outputs of each MSRB are used as the hierarchical features for global feature fusion. Finally, all these features are sent to the reconstruction module for recovering the high-quality image.

In remote-sensing image processing, pan-sharpening is used to obtain a high-resolution multi-spectral image by combining a low-resolution multi-spectral image with a corresponding high-resolution panchromatic image. In this article, to preserve the geometry, spectrum, and correlation information of the original images, three hypotheses are presented, i.e. (1) the geometry information contained in the pan-sharpened image should also be contained in the panchromatic bands; (2) the upsampled multi-spectral image can be seen as a blurred form of the fused image with an unknown kernel; and (3) the fused bands should keep the correlation between each band of the upsampled multi-spectral image. A variational energy functional is then built based on the assumptions, of which the minimizer is the target fused image. The existence of a minimizer of the proposed energy is further analysed, and the numerical scheme based on the split Bregman framework is presented. To verify the validity, the new proposed method is c...

In this letter, we propose an antinoise method for hyperspectral unmixing. In the antinoise method, all noises are addressed. The following techniques are applied: 1) an endmember dictionary is constructed first to initialize the solution; 2) an approximated L 0 norm constraint is employed to prune the dictionary and fulfill the sparse coding; and 3) the Itakura-Saito divergence, instead of the Square of Euclidean Distance divergence, is utilized to construct a novel optimization function. The experimental results on both synthetic and real hyperspectral data sets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

It is well known that the linear mixture model (LMM) is attracting much attention due to its simplicity. However, some theoretical analysis reveals that the traditional LMM also impedes the improvement of blind spectral unmixing. For this reason, we propose a novel blind spectral unmixing method (NBSUM) in this letter. NBSUM utilizes the conjugate gradient to calculate end-member spectral and abundance, which can not only overcome some shortcomings of the traditional LMM but also provide more accurate results. NBSUM is compared with some state-of-the-art approaches on both synthetic and real hyperspectral data sets, and the experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

In this paper, we propose a new fast variational approach to dehaze and denoise simultaneously. The proposed method first estimates a transmission map using a windows adaptive method based on the celebrated dark channel prior. This transmission map can significantly reduce the edge artifact in the resulting image and enhance the estimation precision. The transmission map is then converted to a depth map, with which the new variational model can be built to seek the final haze- and noise-free image. The existence and uniqueness of a minimizer of the proposed variational model is further discussed. A numerical procedure based on the Chambolle--Pock algorithm is given, and the convergence of the algorithm is ensured. Extensive experimental results on real scenes demonstrate that our method can restore vivid and contrastive haze- and noise-free images effectively.

This study proposes two adaptive vectorial total variation models for multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images despeckling with the help of prior knowledge of the image amplitude. Besides despeckling the multi-channel SAR images efficiently, the proposed new models have advantages over other total variation methods in many aspects, such as preserving the radar reflectivity, the targets and edges contrast. The Bermudez-Moreno algorithm and the accelerated fast iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm are employed to implement the new two models, respectively. Experimental results on multi-polarimetric, multi-temporal RADARSAT-2 images show that the visual quality and evaluation indexes of the proposed models and the corresponding algorithms outperform the other methods with edge preservation.

With the increasing availability of multisource image data from Earth observation satellites, image fusion, a technique that produces a single image which preserves major salient features from a set of different inputs, has become an important tool in the field of remote sensing since usually the complete information cannot be obtained by a single sensor. In this article, we develop a new pixel-based variational model for image fusion using gradient features. The basic assumption is that the fused image should have a gradient that is close to the most salient gradient in the multisource inputs. Meanwhile, we integrate the inputs with the average quadratic local dispersion measure for the purpose of uniform and natural perception. Furthermore, we introduce a split Bregman algorithm to implement the proposed functional more effectively. To verify the effect of the proposed method, we visually and quantitatively compare it with the conventional image fusion schemes, such as the Laplacian pyramid, morphological pyramid, and geometry-based enhancement fusion methods. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed method in terms of the related fusion evaluation benchmarks. In particular, the computation efficiency of the proposed method compared with other variational methods also shows that our method is remarkable.

Spectral unmixing aims at estimating the proportions (abundances) of pure spectrums (endmembers) in each mixed pixel of hyperspectral data. Recently, a semi-supervised approach, which takes the spectral library as prior knowledge, has been attracting much attention in unmixing. In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised unmixing model, termed framelet-based sparse unmixing (FSU), which promotes the abundance sparsity in framelet domain and discriminates the approximation and detail components of hyperspectral data after framelet decomposition. Due to the advantages of the framelet representations, e.g., images have good sparse approximations in framelet domain, and most of the additive noises are included in the detail coefficients, the FSU model has a better antinoise capability, and accordingly leads to more desirable unmixing performance. The existence and uniqueness of the minimizer of the FSU model are then discussed, and the split Bregman algorithm and its convergence property are presented to obtain the minimal solution. Experimental results on both simulated data and real data demonstrate that the FSU model generally performs better than the compared methods.

Image super resolution (SR) is an active research topic to obtain an high resolution (HR) image from the low resolution (LR) observation. Many results of existing methods may be corrupted by some artifacts. In this paper, we propose an SR reconstruction method for single image based on nonlocal sparse and low-rank regularization. We form a matrix for each patch with its vectorized similar patches to utilize the redundancy of similar patches in natural images. This matrix can be decomposed as the low rank component and sparse part, where the low rank component depictures the similarity and the sparse part depictures the fine differences and outliers. The SR result is achieved by the iterative method and corroborated by experimental results, showing that our method outperforms other prevalent methods.

Restoring the true scene appearance from hazy image is a challenging task and one of a most necessary part in image processing system. As we know, the clear-day image must have higher contrast compared to the hazy image. Our main idea is that the hazy image is enhanced based on this observation to achieve dehazing objective. Firstly, we use a new metric, simple but powerful Holder coefficient, to estimate the hazy density roughly. In order to make the estimation density map more reasonable, we apply proposed energy function to refine it. Based on the refined map, we propose a new method to estimate the atmosphere light. Secondly, three new terms, which are used to enhance image, are modeled into energy function. Solving this energy function, transmission map can be obtained. Finally, we get haze-free image by using the transmission map. Experiment results demonstrate that our algorithm has similar or better performance compared to the state-of-art algorithms.

Pan-sharpening is a process of acquiring a high resolution multispectral (MS) image by combining a low resolution MS image with a corresponding high resolution panchromatic (PAN) image. In this paper, we propose a new variational pan-sharpening method based on three basic assumptions: 1) the gradient of PAN image could be a linear combination of those of the pan-sharpened image bands; 2) the upsampled low resolution MS image could be a degraded form of the pan-sharpened image; and 3) the gradient in the spectrum direction of pan-sharpened image should be approximated to those of the upsampled low resolution MS image. An energy functional, whose minimizer is related to the best pan-sharpened result, is built based on these assumptions. We discuss the existence of minimizer of our energy and describe the numerical procedure based on the split Bregman algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we qualitatively and quantitatively compare it with some state-of-the-art schemes using QuickBird and IKONOS data. Particularly, we classify the existing quantitative measures into four categories and choose two representatives in each category for more reasonable quantitative evaluation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our method in terms of the related evaluation benchmarks. Besides, the computation efficiency comparison with other variational methods also shows that our method is remarkable.

In this paper, we propose an unified variational approach for image dehazing and denoising from a single input image. Total variation regularization terms are used in the energy functional. Also, we use the negative gradient descent method to solve the corresponding Euler-Lagrange equations. To obtain good initial values, we improve the estimation of transmission map with the windows adaptive method based on the dark channel prior which can overcomes the block effects. The numerical results demonstrate that our algorithm is effective and promising.

In this paper, we make some analysis on the FitzHugh-Nagumo model and improve it to build a neural network, and the network is used to implement visual selection and attention shifting Each group of neurons representing one object of a visual input is synchronized; different groups of neurons representing different objects of a visual input are desynchronized Cooperation and competition mechanism is also introduced to accelerate oscillating frequency of the salient object as well as to slow down other objects, which result in the most salient object jumping to a high frequency oscillation, while all other objects being silent The object corresponding to high frequency oscillation is selected, then the selected object is inhibited and other neurons continue to oscillate to select the next salient object.

In this paper, we propose a vehicle detection method based on AdaBoost. We focus on the detection of front-view car and bus with occlusions on highway. Samples with different occlusion situations are selected into the training set. By using basic and rotated Haar-like features extracted from the samples in the set, we train an AdaBoost-based cascade vehicle detector. The performance tests on static images and short time videos show that (1)our approach detects cars more effectively than buses (2)the real-time detection of our method on video proceeds at 30 frames per second.

An adaptive total variation method to reduce speckles with preservation of targets in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is investigated. Based on the gamma distribution of speckle, an adaptive total variational model is proposed with its fidelity term derived from a framework of weighted maximum likelihood estimation and its regularity term with constraints on the gradient of an image. It has merits of preserving textures and targets since the a priori distribution of noise is incorporated into the model and the weights are essentially image data driven, which can adaptively adjust the weights. The mathematical analysis is carried out, and proof of existence and uniqueness of a solution for the corresponding function is also presented. Theoretical analysis and experiments on both the simulated and real SAR images demonstrate that the method proposed here performs favorably.

It has been demonstrated that the blurring process reduces the high-frequency information of the original sharp image, so the main challenge for image deblurring is to reconstruct high-frequency information from the blurry image. In this paper, we propose a novel image deblurring framework to focus on the reconstruction of high-frequency information, which consists of two main subnetworks: a high-frequency reconstruction subnetwork (HFRSN) and a multi-scale grid subnetwork (MSGSN). The HFRSN is built to reconstruct latent high-frequency information from multiple scale blurry images. The MSGSN performs deblurring processes with high-frequency guidance at different scales simultaneously. Besides, in order to better use high-frequency information to restore sharpening images, we designed a high-frequency information aggregation (HFAG) module and a high-frequency information attention (HFAT) module in MSGSN. The HFAG module is designed to fuse high-frequency features and image features at the feature extraction stage, and the HFAT module is built to enhance the feature reconstruction stage. Extensive experiments on different datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.