IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

We consider a joint source-channel coding system that protects an embedded bitstream using a finite family of channel codes with error detection and error correction capability. The performance of this system may be measured by the expected distortion or by the expected number of correctly decoded source bits. Whereas a rate-based optimal solution can be found in linear time, the computation of a ... View full abstract»

This paper describes a novel technique to recover large similarity transformations (rotation/scale/translation) and moderate perspective deformations among image pairs. We introduce a hybrid algorithm that features log-polar mappings and nonlinear least squares optimization. The use of log-polar techniques in the spatial domain is introduced as a preprocessing module to recover large scale changes... View full abstract»

This paper presents a very efficient algorithm for image denoising based on wavelets and multifractals for singularity detection. A challenge of image denoising is how to preserve the edges of an image when reducing noise. By modeling the intensity surface of a noisy image as statistically self-similar multifractal processes and taking advantage of the multiresolution analysis with wavelet transfo... View full abstract»

Fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based restorations are fast, but at the expense of assuming that the blurring and deblurring are based on circular convolution. Unfortunately, when the opposite sides of the image do not match up well in intensity, this assumption can create significant artifacts across the image. If the pixels outside the measured image window are modeled as unknown values in the rest... View full abstract»

In this paper, we propose a new image inpainting algorithm that relies on explicit edge information. The edge information is used both for the reconstruction of a skeleton image structure in the missing areas, as well as for guiding the interpolation that follows. The structure reconstruction part exploits different properties of the edges, such as the colors of the objects they separate, an estim... View full abstract»

We propose a novel nonparametric regression method for deblurring noisy images. The method is based on the local polynomial approximation (LPA) of the image and the paradigm of intersecting confidence intervals (ICI) that is applied to define the adaptive varying scales (window sizes) of the LPA estimators. The LPA-ICI algorithm is nonlinear and spatially adaptive with respect to smoothness and ir... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a two-phase scheme for removing salt-and-pepper impulse noise. In the first phase, an adaptive median filter is used to identify pixels which are likely to be contaminated by noise (noise candidates). In the second phase, the image is restored using a specialized regularization method that applies only to those selected noise candidates. In terms of edge preservation and noise ... View full abstract»

In this paper, we present a new information-theoretic approach to image segmentation. We cast the segmentation problem as the maximization of the mutual information between the region labels and the image pixel intensities, subject to a constraint on the total length of the region boundaries. We assume that the probability densities associated with the image pixel intensities within each region ar... View full abstract»

We propose a novel algorithm to partition an image with low depth-of-field (DOF) into focused object-of-interest (OOI) and defocused background. The proposed algorithm unfolds into three steps. In the first step, we transform the low-DOF image into an appropriate feature space, in which the spatial distribution of the high-frequency components is represented. This is conducted by computing higher ... View full abstract»

Image segmentation is a fundamental problem in early computer vision. In segmentation of flat shaded, nontextured objects in real-world images, objects are usually assumed to be piecewise homogeneous. This assumption, however, is not always valid with images such as medical images. As a result, any techniques based on this assumption may produce less-than-satisfactory image segmentation. In this w... View full abstract»

We propose a new approach for image segmentation that is based on low-level features for color and texture. It is aimed at segmentation of natural scenes, in which the color and texture of each segment does not typically exhibit uniform statistical characteristics. The proposed approach combines knowledge of human perception with an understanding of signal characteristics in order to segment natur... View full abstract»

Recently, Chan and Vese developed an active contour model for image segmentation and smoothing by using piecewise constant and smooth representation of an image. Tsai et al. also independently developed a segmentation and smoothing method similar to the Chan and Vese piecewise smooth approach. These models are active contours based on the Mumford-Shah variational approach and the level-set method.... View full abstract»

The need for video summarization originates primarily from a viewing time constraint. A shorter version of the original video sequence is desirable in a number of applications. Clearly, a shorter version is also necessary in applications where storage, communication bandwidth, and/or power are limited. The summarization process inevitably introduces distortion. The amount of summarization distorti... View full abstract»

This paper aims at tracking vehicles from monocular intensity image sequences and presents an efficient and robust approach to three-dimensional (3-D) model-based vehicle tracking. Under the weak perspective assumption and the ground-plane constraint, the movements of model projection in the two-dimensional image plane can be decomposed into two motions: translation and rotation. They are the resu... View full abstract»

The separation of image content into semantic parts plays a vital role in applications such as compression, enhancement, restoration, and more. In recent years, several pioneering works suggested such a separation be based on variational formulation and others using independent component analysis and sparsity. This paper presents a novel method for separating images into texture and piecewise smoo... View full abstract»

The inverse halftoning algorithm is used to reconstruct a gray image from an input halftone image. Based on the recently published lookup table (LUT) technique, this paper presents a novel edge-based LUT method for inverse halftoning which improves the quality of the reconstructed gray image. The proposed method first uses the LUT-based inverse halftoning method as a preprocessing step to transfor... View full abstract»

This paper presents a novel technique for image watermarking based on chaos theory. Chaotic parameter modulation (CPM) is employed to modulate the copyright information into the bifurcating parameter of a chaotic system. The system output is a wideband signal and is used as a watermark to be inserted into the host image. In the detection, a novel method based on the ergodic property of chaotic sig... View full abstract»

The aim is to model "activity" performed by a group of moving and interacting objects (which can be people, cars, or different rigid components of the human body) and use the models for abnormal activity detection. Previous approaches to modeling group activity include co-occurrence statistics (individual and joint histograms) and dynamic Bayesian networks, neither of which is applicable when the ... View full abstract»

This paper presents a generalized Bayesian framework for relevance feedback in content-based image retrieval. The proposed feedback technique is based on the Bayesian learning method and incorporates a time-varying user model into the formulation. We define the user model with two terms: a target query and a user conception. The target query is aimed to learn the common features from relevant imag... View full abstract»

This study investigates random accessibility and efficiency enhancements in highly scalable video and volumetric compression. With the advent of interactive multimedia technology, random accessibility has emerged as an increasingly important consideration in the design and optimization process. In this paper, we assess the impact that the transform, embedded coding components, and code-block confi... View full abstract»

This paper presents a new formulation of the regularized image up-sampling problem that incorporates models of the image acquisition and display processes. We give a new analytic perspective that justifies the use of total-variation regularization from a signal processing perspective, based on an analysis that specifies the requirements of edge-directed filtering. This approach leads to a new data... View full abstract»