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On-orbit real-time image processing is of increasing demands due to requirements for quick-response missions. Image destriping is usually an important pre-processing step to improve image quality in practice. The unidirectional variational models have shown impressive destriping performance. However, they are not easy for real-time implementation for high-computation complexity and there are few attempts for hardware implementation. This article is the first hardware implementation of variational image destriping algorithm, which achieves high throughput for large-swath remote-sensing images. In this article, a fully pipelined hardware architecture is proposed. First, the involved iteration loop is unrolled and a coarse-grained parallelism is obtained. Second, for each deployed iteration computation blocks (ICBs), a dedicated timing arrangement is designed to alleviate the bottleneck caused by the data dependency within each ICB, obtaining a fine-grained parallelism. Moreover, to further optimize the critical path, an approximate simplification scheme is proposed, saving the resource usage and reducing computing delay. The proposed architecture is implemented and verified on a XILINX 6vcx240t field programmable gate array (FPGA); it achieves a maximum frame rate up to 41.9 frames/s with delay of only tens of row cycles for 8-bit ${{2048}} \times {{2048}}$ images. It performs all the processing on the pixels in raster scan order on- the-fly as they are being transmitted from camera payload, which significantly facilitates on- orbit real-time processing of large-swath remote-sensing images with high data rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A poor inherent resolution capability of the passive millimeter-wave (PMMW) imaging becomes a problem in many applications. This paper proposes a parametric blind deconvolution approach for improving the resolution of PMMW images with low signal-to-noise ratio. Image deconvolution is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem when only partial knowledge of the point spread function (PSF) is available, therefore, regularization techniques need to be used. To restore high quality PMMW image, framelet based regularization constraint is incorporated into parametric blind PMMW image deconvolution framework, which is modeled as an alternative optimization problem about the image and the PSF. The PSF is modeled as a parametric form to restrict the PSF solution space. Furthermore, the split Bregman iteration is used to solve the resulting minimization problem. Comparative experimental results on simulated and real PMMW images show that the proposed method can effectively suppress noise, reduce artifacts, and improve the spatial resolution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the paper, a multiframe blind image deconvolution method based on total variation and framelet regularizer is proposed. An adapted version of the split Bregman method is proposed to efficiently solve the resulting minimization problems. In each iteration, four sub-problems need to be solved, one of which can be very efficiently and easily solved via fast Fourier transform implementation or closed form solution. Both simulated noisy and blurred frames and real degraded frames are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Comparative experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently remove the blur and noises and restore high quality sharp image. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Total variation (TV) has been used as a popular and effective image prior model in regularization-based image restoration, because of its ability to preserve edges. However, as the total variation model favors a piecewise constant solution, the processing results in the flat regions of the image are poor, and the amplitude of the edges will be underestimated; the underlying cause of the problem is that the model is based on derivation which only considers the local feature of the image. In this paper, we first propose an adaptive non-local total variation image blind restoration algorithm for deblurring a single image via a non-local total variation operator, which exploits the correlation in the image, and then an extended split Bregman iteration is proposed to address the joint minimization problem. Second, the maximum average absolute difference (MAAD) method is employed to estimate the blur support and initialize the blur kernel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach produces results superior to most methods in both visual image quality and quantitative measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Multi-detectors imaging system often suffers from the problem of the stripe noise, which greatly degrades the quality of the resulting images. To better remove stripe noise and preserve the edge and texture information, a robust destriping algorithm with spatially adaptive unidirectional total variation (SAUTV) model is introduced. The spatial information of the striping noise is detected by using the stripe indicator called difference eigenvalue, and a weighted parameter determined by the difference eigenvalue information is added to constrain the regularization strength of the UTV regularization. The proposed algorithm can effectively remove the stripe noise and preserve the edge and detailed information. Moreover, it becomes more robust with the change of the regularization parameter. Split Bregman method is utilized to efficiently solve the resulting minimization problem. Comparative results on simulated and real striped images taken with two kinds of imaging systems are reported. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]