No Arabic abstract
In a class of piecewise-constant image segmentation models, we propose to incorporate a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation (AITV) to regularize the partition boundaries in an image. In particular, we replace the total variation regularization in the Chan-Vese segmentation model and a fuzzy region competition model by the proposed AITV. To deal with the nonconvex nature of AITV, we apply the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA), in which the subproblems can be minimized by the primal-dual hybrid gradient method with linesearch. The convergence of the DCA scheme is analyzed. In addition, a generalization to color image segmentation is discussed. In the numerical experiments, we compare the proposed models with the classic convex approaches and the two-stage segmentation methods (smoothing and then thresholding) on various images, showing that our models are effective in image segmentation and robust with respect to impulsive noises.
In this paper, we propose a regularization technique for noisy-image super-resolution and image denoising. Total variation (TV) regularization is adopted in many image processing applications to preserve the local smoothness. However, TV prior is prone to oversmoothness, staircasing effect, and contrast losses. Nonlocal TV (NLTV) mitigates the contrast losses by adaptively weighting the smoothness based on the similarity measure of image patches. Although it suppresses the noise effectively in the flat regions, it might leave residual noise surrounding the edges especially when the image is not oversmoothed. To address this problem, we propose the bilateral spectrum weighted total variation (BSWTV). Specially, we apply a locally adaptive shrink coefficient to the image gradients and employ the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the weighted image gradients to effectively refine the weighting map and suppress the residual noise. In conjunction with the data fidelity term derived from a mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise model, the objective function is decomposed and solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. In order to remove outliers and facilitate the convergence stability, the weighting map is smoothed by a Gaussian filter with an iteratively decreased kernel width and updated in a momentum-based manner in each ADMM iteration. We benchmark our method with the state-of-the-art approaches on the public real-world datasets for super-resolution and image denoising. Experiments show that the proposed method obtains outstanding performance for super-resolution and achieves promising results for denoising on real-world images.
Domain adaptation (DA) has drawn high interests for its capacity to adapt a model trained on labeled source data to perform well on unlabeled or weakly labeled target data from a different domain. Most common DA techniques require the concurrent access to the input images of both the source and target domains. However, in practice, it is common that the source images are not available in the adaptation phase. This is a very frequent DA scenario in medical imaging, for instance, when the source and target images come from different clinical sites. We propose a novel formulation for adapting segmentation networks, which relaxes such a constraint. Our formulation is based on minimizing a label-free entropy loss defined over target-domain data, which we further guide with a domain invariant prior on the segmentation regions. Many priors can be used, derived from anatomical information. Here, a class-ratio prior is learned via an auxiliary network and integrated in the form of a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence in our overall loss function. We show the effectiveness of our prior-aware entropy minimization in adapting spine segmentation across different MRI modalities. Our method yields comparable results to several state-of-the-art adaptation techniques, even though is has access to less information, the source images being absent in the adaptation phase. Our straight-forward adaptation strategy only uses one network, contrary to popular adversarial techniques, which cannot perform without the presence of the source images. Our framework can be readily used with various priors and segmentation problems.
Quantitative image analysis often depends on accurate classification of pixels through a segmentation process. However, imaging artifacts such as the partial volume effect and sensor noise complicate the classification process. These effects increase the pixel intensity variance of each constituent class, causing intensities from one class to overlap with another. This increased variance makes threshold based segmentation methods insufficient due to ambiguous overlap regions in the pixel intensity distributions. The class ambiguity becomes even more complex for systems with more than two constituents, such as unsaturated moist granular media. In this paper, we propose an image processing workflow that improves segmentation accuracy for multiphase systems. First, the ambiguous transition regions between classes are identified and removed, which allows for global thresholding of single-class regions. Then the transition regions are classified using a distance function, and finally both segmentations are combined into one classified image. This workflow includes three methodologies for identifying transition pixels and we demonstrate on a variety of synthetic images that these approaches are able to accurately separate the ambiguous transition pixels from the single-class regions. For situations with typical amounts of image noise, misclassification errors and area differences calculated between each class of the synthetic images and the resultant segmented images range from 0.69-1.48% and 0.01-0.74%, respectively, showing the segmentation accuracy of this approach. We demonstrate that we are able to accurately segment x-ray microtomography images of moist granular media using these computationally efficient methodologies.
The Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional is a phase-field approximation of the Mumford-Shah functional that has been widely used for image segmentation. The approximation has the advantages of being easy to implement, maintaining the segmentation ability, and $Gamma$-converging to the Mumford-Shah functional. However, it has been observed in actual computation that the segmentation ability of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional varies significantly with different values of the parameter and it even fails to $Gamma$-converge to the original functional for some cases. In this paper we present an asymptotic analysis on the gradient flow equation of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional and show that the functional can have different segmentation behavior for small but finite values of the regularization parameter and eventually loses its segmentation ability as the parameter goes to zero when the input image is treated as a continuous function. This is consistent with the existing observation as well as the numerical examples presented in this work. A selection strategy for the regularization parameter and a scaling procedure for the solution are devised based on the analysis. Numerical results show that they lead to good segmentation of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional for real images.
In the past decade, sparsity-driven regularization has led to significant improvements in image reconstruction. Traditional regularizers, such as total variation (TV), rely on analytical models of sparsity. However, increasingly the field is moving towards trainable models, inspired from deep learning. Deep image prior (DIP) is a recent regularization framework that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture without data-driven training. This paper extends the DIP framework by combining it with the traditional TV regularization. We show that the inclusion of TV leads to considerable performance gains when tested on several traditional restoration tasks such as image denoising and deblurring.