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The soft additive segmentation model attempts to solve the problem related to the segmentation of overlapping objects with additive intensity value. An issue in optimizing the soft additive segmentation functional is that a high-order nonlinear partial differential equation needs to be solved, which, for most standard algorithms, involves high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient numerical algorithm to optimize the soft additive segmentation model. We reformulate the original minimization problem into a sequence of simpler minimization problems that can be solved efficiently by using the augmented Lagrangian method. Numerical tests on real and synthetic cases are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a variant of the Mumford–Shah model for the segmentation of a pair of overlapping objects with additive intensity value. Unlike standard segmentation models, it does not only determine distinct objects in the image, but also recover the possibly multiple membership of the pixels. To accomplish this, some a priori knowledge about the smoothness of the object boundary is integrated into the model. Additivity is imposed through a soft constraint which allows the user to control the degree of additivity and is more robust than the hard constraint. We also show analytically that the additivity parameter can be chosen to achieve some stability conditions. To solve the optimization problem involving geometric quantities efficiently, we apply a multiphase level set method. Segmentation results on synthetic and real images validate the good performance of our model, and demonstrate the model's applicability to images with multiple channels and multiple objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider a bilaterally constrained optimization model arising from the semisupervised multiple-class image segmentation problem. We prove that the solution of the corresponding unconstrained problem satisfies a discrete maximum principle. This implies that the bilateral constraints are satisfied automatically and that the solution is unique. Although the structure of the coefficient matrices arising from the optimality conditions of the segmentation problem is different for different input images, we show that they are M-matrices in general. Therefore, we study several numerical methods for solving such linear systems and demonstrate that domain decomposition with block relaxation methods are quite effective and outperform other tested methods. We also carry out a numerical study of condition numbers on the effect of boundary conditions on the optimization problems, which provides some insights into the specification of boundary conditions as an input knowledge in the learning context. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 20, 191–201, 2010 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies image deblurring problems using a total variation-based model, with a non-negativity constraint. The addition of the non-negativity constraint improves the quality of the solutions, but makes the solution process a difficult one. The contribution of our work is a fast and robust numerical algorithm to solve the non-negatively constrained problem. To overcome the nondifferentiability of the total variation norm, we formulate the constrained deblurring problem as a primal-dual program which is a variant of the formulation proposed by Chan, Golub, and Mulet for unconstrained problems. Here, dual refers to a combination of the Lagrangian and Fenchel duals. To solve the constrained primal-dual program, we use a semi-smooth Newton's method. We exploit the relationship between the semi-smooth Newton's method and the primal-dual active set method to achieve considerable simplification of the computations. The main advantages of our proposed scheme are: no parameters need significant adjustment, a standard inverse preconditioner works very well, quadratic rate of local convergence (theoretical and numerical), numerical evidence of global convergence, and high accuracy of solving the optimality system. The scheme shows robustness of performance over a wide range of parameters. A comprehensive set of numerical comparisons are provided against other methods to solve the same problem which show the speed and accuracy advantages of our scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]