Geometry-based image retrieval in binary image databases

In this paper, a geometry-based image retrieval system is developed for multi-object images. We model both shape and topology of image objects using a structured representation called curvature tree (CT). The hierarchy of the CT reflects the inclusion relationships between the image objects. To facilitate shape-based matching, triangle-area representation (TAR) of each object is stored at the corresponding node in the CT. The similarity between two multi-object images is measured based on the maximum similarity subtree isomorphism (MSSI) between their CTs. For this purpose, we adopt a recursive algorithm to solve the MSSI problem and a very effective dynamic programming algorithm to measure the similarity between the attributed nodes. Our matching scheme agrees with many recent findings in psychology about the human perception of multi-object images. Experiments on a database of 13500 real and synthesized medical images and the MPEG-7 CE-1 database of 1400 shape images have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

The effectiveness of image features based on fractal image coding for image annotation

Image annotation is a process of assigning metadata to digital images in the form of captions or keywords, and has been regarded as image management and one of the most crucial processes of image retrieval. And many automatic methods have been proposed. However, these methods still have some problems respectively. Fractals are fragmented geometries and can be considered separate parts; each part is similar to the contracted overall shape. Fractal features provide geometric information of an image that is irrelevant to the shape and size of an object in the image; therefore, fractal features are more robust than color and texture features. Therefore, this study proposed a fractal-driven image annotation (FIA) schema that extracts fractal features through fractal image coding and integrates color and texture as new visual features to conduct image-based annotation. Experimental results indicate that the effect of thresholds on annotating accuracy is insignificant. This finding supports the application of FIA on complex practical environments, reduces the time for identifying the optimal thresholds, and improves the practicality of using FIA in real environments.     

Attention-driven image interpretation with application to image retrieval

Visual attention, a selective procedure of human's early vision, plays a very important role for humans to understand a scene by intuitively emphasizing some focused regions/objects. Being aware of this, we propose an attention-driven image interpretation method that pops out visual attentive objects from an image iteratively by maximizing a global attention function. In this method, an image can be interpreted as containing several perceptually attended objects as well as a background, where each object has an attention value. The attention values of attentive objectives are then mapped to importance factors so as to facilitate the subsequent image retrieval. An attention-driven matching algorithm is proposed in this paper based on a retrieval strategy emphasizing attended objects. Experiments on 7376 Hemera color images annotated by keywords show that the retrieval results from our attention-driven approach compare favorably with conventional methods, especially when the important objects are seriously concealed by the irrelevant background.     

Medical image retrieval based on unclean image bags

Traditional content-based image retrieval (CBIR) scheme with assumption of independent individual images in large-scale collections suffers from poor retrieval performance. In medical applications, images usually exist in the form of image bags and each bag includes multiple relevant images of the same perceptual meaning. In this paper, based on these natural image bags, we explore a new scheme to improve the performance of medical image retrieval. It is feasible and efficient to search the bag-based medical image collection by providing a query bag. However, there is a critical problem of noisy images which may present in image bags and severely affect the retrieval performance. A new three-stage solution is proposed to perform the retrieval and handle the noisy images. In stage 1, in order to alleviate the influence of noisy images, we associate each image in the image bags with a relevance degree. In stage 2, a novel similarity aggregation method is proposed to incorporate image relevance and feature importance into the similarity computation process. In stage 3, we obtain the final image relevance in an adaptive way which can consider both image bag similarity and individual image similarity. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can improve the image retrieval performance significantly.     

Analysis of all-in-focus image processing in image restoration

We discuss a new deblurring problems in this paper. Focus measurements play a fundamental role in image processing techniques. Most traditional methods neglect spatial information in the frequency domain. Therefore, this study analyzed image data in the frequency domain to determine the value of spatial information. but instead misleading noise reduction results . We found that the local feature is not always a guide for noise reduction. This finding leads to a new method to measure the image edges in focus deblurring. We employed an all-in-focus measure in the frequency domain, based on the energy level of frequency components. We also used a multi-circle enhancement model to analyze this spatial information to provide a more accurate method for measuring images. We compared our results with those using other methods in similar studies. Findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our new method.     

Probability-based reversible image authentication scheme for image demosaicking

In this paper, we propose a novel image authentication scheme to detect the tampered areas for image demosaicking with the reversibility preserving property. Image demosaicking is the process of reconstructing an RGB color image from the sampled data acquired by the digital camera that applies a color filter array to a single sensor. In the proposed scheme, the authentication data is embedded into the rebuilt components of the demosaicked pixels.From the results, it is shown that good image qualities of the embedded images are obtained by using the proposed scheme. When the illegal users modified the contents of the embedded images, the tampered areas in the modified images can be clearly detected by using the proposed scheme. The demosaicked images can be losslessly recovered if no modifications are done on the embedded images. The proposed authentication codes embedding process can be implemented by hardware in single sensor digital camera. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can be extended to protect the image integrity for cloud computing environments.     

基于图像蒙板的无监督图像风格迁移

目前大多数的图像风格迁移方法属于有监督学习,训练数据需要成对出现,并且在处理图像背景时,现有的方法过于繁琐。针对这些问题,提出了一种基于图像蒙板的无监督图像风格迁移方法。在实验中,采用了基于循环一致性的CycleGAN架构,并使用Inception-ResNet结构设计了一个全新的具有内置图像蒙板的生成式模型,最后通过无监督学习将图像的背景与学习到的抽象特征进行自动重组。实验表明,新方法有效地对图像背景和抽象特征进行自动分离与重组,同时解决了特征学习过程中的区域干扰问题,获得了可观的视觉效果。     

基于内容的图像检索技术与医学图像检索

在分析基于内容的图像检索技术特点的基础上，提出了4种基于内容的图像检索方法，并对每种方法的实现特别是特征抽取进行了一定的研究。根据医学图像的使用特点，对基于内容的医学图像检索技术进行了初步的研究；对医学图像特征的抽取，应将重点放在形状特征和纹理特征的抽取上；同时，对医学图像进行检索，还可以使用颜色空间分布特征，来进一步进行相似匹配。     

基于特征匹配的亚像素级全景图像配准算法

为了提高全景图全自动拼接中图像配准的速度和匹配稳健性,提出了一种基于相对距离法去除外点的亚像素级图像配准算法,并给出了分析和实验结果,亚像素级像素定位误差在0.01~0.1之内。在对12组图像匹配的实验结果表明,该匹配算法的匹配正确率达到100%,且匹配的时间小于目前通用的RANSAC匹配算法。     

Stereoscopic image generation with depth image based rendering

In this paper, we proposed stereoscopic image generation methods of adjusting the depth value of edge pixels and improved hole filling procedures. For the conventional system, the smooth of depth map can reduce the incidence of image holes, but cause geometric distortions of the image depth. To solve the problems, the depth map is first expanded to refine the accuracy of image depth and the quality of images. Next, we derive a hardware-oriented method for 3D warping. Finally, appropriate blocks are searched to enhance the performance of image by improving hole-filling procedures. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed methods have great performance and practicability.     

WND-CHARM: Multi-purpose image classification using compound image transforms

We describe a multi-purpose image classifier that can be applied to a wide variety of image classification tasks without modifications or fine-tuning, and yet provide classification accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art task-specific image classifiers. The proposed image classifier first extracts a large set of 1025 image features including polynomial decompositions, high contrast features, pixel statistics, and textures. These features are computed on the raw image, transforms of the image, and transforms of transforms of the image. The feature values are then used to classify test images into a set of pre-defined image classes. This classifier was tested on several different problems including biological image classification and face recognition. Although we cannot make a claim of universality, our experimental results show that this classifier performs as well or better than classifiers developed specifically for these image classification tasks. Our classifier's high performance on a variety of classification problems is attributed to (i) a large set of features extracted from images; and (ii) an effective feature selection and weighting algorithm sensitive to specific image classification problems. The algorithms are available for free download from openmicroscopy.org.     

固定图像作码本的分形图像压缩

分形图像编码所需要的码本都是来自于被编码图像,提出了一种简化的分形图像压缩算法,该方法的码本来自一个固定的图像,这样的一个码本适用于编码任何图像。实验表明这样做不仅简化了分形图像编码,而且还提高了峰值信噪比,在处理一些较大图像时能够大大提高编码速度。     

基于图像增强的井下图像拼接

为了通过图像采集技术实时监控煤矿井下生产情况, 提出了基于图像增强的井下图像拼接算法。利用局部双边滤波算法对图像进行增强,在此基础上再利用近似的Hessian矩阵和框状滤波确定特征点的位置,然后,计算特征点的描述子向量,采用最近距离比次近距离的匹配算法将特征点配对,最后利用特征点对计算得出变换矩阵,采用线性渐变融合方法进行图像融合。通过图像增强前后特征点数量对比实验验证了增强算法的有效性,并证明了该算法显著提高了SURF（Speeded Up Robust Features）算法的拼接效率,有利于提高匹配的准确性和拼接的快速性。     

Multilevel image segmentation with adaptive image context based thresholding

Neural network based image segmentation techniques primarily focus on the selection of appropriate thresholding points in the image feature space. Research initiatives in this direction aim at addressing this problem of effective threshold selection for activation functions. Multilevel activation functions resort to fixed and uniform thresholding mechanisms. These functions assume homogeneity of the image information content. In this paper, we propose a collection of adaptive thresholding approaches to multilevel activation functions. The proposed thresholding mechanisms incorporate the image context information in the thresholding process. Applications of these mechanisms are demonstrated on the segmentation of real life multilevel intensity images using a self-supervised multilayer self-organizing neural network (MLSONN) and a supervised pyramidal neural network (PyraNet).We also present a bi-directional self-organizing neural network (BDSONN) architecture suitable for multilevel image segmentation. The architecture uses an embedded adaptive thresholding mechanism to a characteristic multilevel activation function.The segmentation efficiencies of the thresholding mechanisms evaluated using four unsupervised measures of merit, are reported for the three neural network architectures considered.     

结合暗原色图像参考的单幅图像去雾*

针对在暗原色先验理论下对天空区域的透射率估计总是过于偏小的问题,提出了一种基于暗原色图像的透射率纠正方法。以暗原色图像为参考,提取其天空等明亮区域的灰度归一化值替换生成新的透射率图。该方式提高了天空区域的透射率值,使其更接近于真实值。实验结果表明,对于各类雾化图像,在无需调整各参数值的情况下,该算法均能很好地避免天空区域出现色差失真问题;同时对于不含天空区域的图像,去雾仍然有效。此外,算法执行时无需进行复杂的天空区域识别及提取等操作。算法在实际去雾应用中实现了无参化,自动化程度高;对于分辨率为640?480彩色图像,速度可达1.5帧/s。     

结合全局信息的局部图像灰度拟合模型

针对局部图像拟合（LIF）模型对初始轮廓大小、形状和位置敏感的问题,提出一个结合全局信息的局部图像灰度拟合模型。首先,构造了一个基于全局图像信息的全局项;其次,将该全局项与LIF模型中的局部项线性组合;最后,得到了一个以偏微分方程形式存在的图像分割模型。数值实现采用有限差分法,同时采用高斯滤波器正则化水平集函数以确保水平集函数的光滑作用。在分割实验中,当选取不同的初始轮廓时,该模型均能得到正确的分割结果,且分割时间仅为LIF模型的20%到50%。实验结果表明,所提模型既对演化曲线初始轮廓的大小、形状和位置都不敏感,又能够有效地分割灰度不均图像,且分割速度较快。此外,在无初始轮廓的情形下,该模型能快速分割一些真实图像和人造图像。     

基于PCNN图像因子分解的X线医学图像增强

提出一种基于人眼视觉特性和改进的PCNN图像因子分解的X线医学图像增强算法。利用一种改进的PCNN图像因子分解算法对图像进行因子分解,得到细节程度由粗糙到精细的 一系列图像因子。分别对各层图像因子平滑滤波获得图像因子增益矩阵,根据图像因子的局部对比度是否达到由人眼视觉特性得到的对比度阈值进行自适应调节增益矩阵,对每层 图像因子增强后重构即可得到增强图像。经过对不同X线医学图像进行实验仿真,并对比一些常用图像增强算法,取得了较好的增强效果。     

采用双尺度图像分解的水下彩色图像增强

目的 为解决水下图像的色偏和低对比度等问题,提出一种基于双尺度图像分解的水下彩色图像增强算法。方法 通过基于均值和方差的对比度拉伸方法改善图像的色偏问题,并利用中值滤波降低红通道对比度拉伸后引入的噪声;采用双尺度图像分解绿通道图像补偿红通道图像细节;在处理后的红通道图像中引入原始图像红通道的真实细节与颜色。结果 选取不同水下图像作为实验数据集,将本文方法与暗通道先验的方法、基于融合的方法、自动红通道恢复方法以及一种基于卷积神经网络深度学习的方法相比较,首先从主观视觉效果进行定性分析,然后通过不同评测指标进行定量分析。主观定性分析结果表明,提出的方法相比较其他方法能够更好地解决图像色偏和红色阴影问题;定量分析中,自然图像质量评价（natural image quality evaluation,NIQE）指标和信息熵（information entropy,IE）值较基于融合的方法和深度学习的方法分别提高了1.8%和13.6%,且水下图像质量评价指标（underwater image quality measurement method,UIQM）较其他方法更优。结论 提出的双尺度图像分解方法利用水下图像成像特点解决图像色偏以及低对比度问题,具有良好的适应能力,同时算法复杂度低且鲁棒性较高,普遍适用于复杂的水下彩色图像增强。     

Retinal image quality assessment using generic image quality indicators

A retinal image gradability assessment algorithm based on the fusion of generic image quality indicators is introduced. Four features quantifying image colour, focus, contrast and illumination are computed using novel image processing techniques. These quality indicators are also combined and classified to evaluate the image suitability for diagnostic purposes. The algorithm performance is thoroughly appraised through comparison of the automatic classification results of 2032 retinal images from proprietary, DRIVE, Messidor, ROC and STARE datasets with human made classification, revealing a sensitivity of 99.76% and a specificity of 99.49%. The algorithm computational complexity and sensitivity to image noise and resolution were also experimentally quantified demonstrating very good performance and confirming the usability of the solution in an ambulatory application environment.