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In this work, we propose novel methods for the generation of multiple depth layers and all-in-focus images. Multiple depth layers are produced by applying a sequence of blurring and deblurring operations to determine the depth. The proposed method makes no assumptions with regard to the properties of the scene in resolving depth ambiguity in complex images. We also developed a method by which to generate all-in-focus images, in which the sharpness is preserved and instabilities imposed by conventional deblurring operations largely eliminated. This method involves updating outliers, for which depth was over-estimated, while compensating for errors in the estimation of depth imposed by deblurring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proximal K-singular value decomposition (PK-SVD) is a dictionary updating algorithm that incorporates proximal point method into K-SVD. The attempt of combining proximal method and K-SVD has achieved promising result in such areas as sparse approximation, image denoising, and image compression. However, the optimization procedure of PK-SVD is complicated and, therefore, limits the algorithm in both theoretical analysis and practical use. This article proposes a simple but effective optimization approach to the formulation of PK-SVD. We cast this formulation as a fitting problem and relax the constraint on the direction of the k'th row in the sparse coefficient matrix. This relaxation strengthens the regularization effect of the proximal point. The proposed algorithm needs fewer steps to implement and further boost the performance of PK-SVD while maintaining the same computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms conventional algorithms in reconstruction error, recovery rate, and convergence speed for sparse approximation and achieves better results in image denoising. ©2016 SPIE and IS&T [DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.25.5.053036] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of the Bayesian approach, the denoising problem is essentially a prior probability modeling and estimation task. In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits a hidden Bayesian network, constructed from wavelet coefficients, to model the prior probability of the original image. Then, we use the belief propagation (BP) algorithm, which estimates a coefficient based on all the coefficients of an image, as the maximum-a-posterior (MAP) estimator to derive the denoised wavelet coefficients. We show that if the network is a spanning tree, the standard BP algorithm can perform MAP estimation efficiently. Our experiment results demonstrate that, in terms of the peak-signal-to-noise-ratio and perceptual quality, the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on several images, particularly in the textured regions, with various amounts of white Gaussian noise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Typical mosaicing schemes assume that to-be-combined images are equally informative; thus, the images are processed in a similar manner. However, the new imaging technique for confocal fluorescence images has revealed a problem when two asymmetrically informative biological images are stitched during microscope image mosaicing. The latter process is widely used in biological studies to generate a higher resolution image by combining multiple images taken at different times and angles. To resolve the earlier problem, we propose a multiresolution optimization approach that evaluates the blending coefficients based on the relative importance of the overlapping regions of the to-be-combined image pair. The blending coefficients are the optimal solution obtained by a quadratic programming algorithm with constraints that are enforced by the biological requirements. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach on several confocal microscope fluorescence images and compare the results with those derived by other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]