Estimating frequencies of damped sinusoids is the underlying problem of many practical applications. Existing algorithms are often inaccurate for estimating frequencies from damped sinusoids since many of them are designed for undamped signals. In this paper we propose an algorithm to estimate frequencies of a sum of damped sinusoids. This algorithm combines the Gauss-Newton method with an exact formula for single-frequency estimation. As validated by extensive simulations, the proposed algorithm provides nearly optimal estimations of frequencies of damped sinusoids, and is much more efficient than others when the signal has a large number of samples.

Despeckling of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images has seen significant progress in recent years, largely driven by advancements in deep learning techniques. However, many of these approaches face challenges when applied to new SAR datasets, primarily due to their dependence on ground truth images, which are often unavailable for real-world sensors. In this paper, we address this limitation by extending the concept of unbiased risk estimation in the presence of Gamma-distributed multiplicative speckle. Specifically, we demonstrate that it is possible to train deep denoising networks without relying on ground truth data using our estimator. We introduce a new formulation of the Multiplicative Unbiased Risk Estimator (MURE) and present a computationally efficient Monte Carlo-based method that enables accurate estimation of the modified MURE cost, facilitating effective unsupervised training of deep neural networks from large datasets consisting solely of noisy SAR images. Experimental results on both synthetic datasets and real Sentinel-1 SAR images validate the suitability of our method for real-world applications. Even without ground truth, our method achieves performance that closely matches the Oracle-based denoiser and proves superior to the out-of-domain performance of popular supervised SAR despeckling methods.

Abstract. Most image denoising problems focus on additive white Gaussian noise. In real-world imaging scenarios such as ultrasound, synthetic aperture radar, and optical-coherence tomography, the noise is multiplicative. Multiplicative noise has an extreme degradation effect compared to additive noise of the same variance. Further, in a practical imaging setting, one does not have access to the ground-truth clean images to train a deep neural network in a supervised fashion for image denoising. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised image denoising method for multiplicative noise. Specifically, we consider lognormal noise and develop an unbiased risk estimator of the mean-square error (MSE). We show that the resulting lognormal noise unbiased risk estimate, which we abbreviate as LURE, is an accurate estimator of the Oracle MSE. Computation of LURE involves the weighted trace of the Jacobian, which we estimate using a stochastic/Monte Carlo approximation method that is not only fast but also results in an accurate estimate of the MSE. The framework is flexible enough to accommodate a wide spectrum of denoisers—from wavelet denoising techniques to state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, subject to certain smoothness conditions on the denoiser. We deploy modern deep learning models such as U-Net, dilated-residual U-Net (DRUNet), and gradient step denoiser with DRUNet (GS-DRUNet) to establish the reliability of LURE. The performance measures used are peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index metric (SSIM). We show that minimizing Monte Carlo LURE in an unsupervised setting gives results that are on par with and sometimes even better than those obtained using the Oracle MSE loss in the supervised setting. We also provide comparisons with unsupervised despeckling techniques such as SAR2SAR, SAR-CNN, and Speckle2Void on real-world noisy images.

Signal and image representations that are steerable are essential to capture efficiently directional features. However, those that are successful at achieving directional selectivity usually use too many subbands, resulting in low computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional nonlinear transform that uses only two subbands to achieve rotation invariance property, and enjoys a mirror reconstruction making it similar to a "tight frame". The two-subband structure is merged into a unique, concise, complex-valued subband that approximates a Wirtinger gradient which is naturally steerable. Complete steerability, though, is achieved by utilizing the Fourier-Argand representation, which provides a steerable filter able to estimate the amplitude and direction of image features, even in the presence of very high noise. We demonstrate the efficiency of the representation by comparing how it performs in wavelet-based denoising algorithms.

In this paper, we propose a generalized Blind Source Separation (BSS) method using a novel assumption which we call “weak exclusion” principle. We first give the mathematical definition of the exclusion criterion and propose an iterative algorithm to minimize it. We then test WEP in simulated and real datasets, compared with other four methods. The experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that WEP outperforms the other methods, both in terms of accuracy and in terms of speed.

High-speed is an essential requirement for many applications of image registration. However, existing methods are usually time-consuming due to the difficulty of the task. In this paper, different from usual feature-based ideas, we convert the matching problem into an algebraic optimization task. By solving a series of quadratic optimization equations, the underlying deformation (rotation, scaling and shift) between image pairs can be retrieved. This process is extremely fast and can be performed in real-time. Experiments show that our method can achieve good performance at a much lower computation cost. When used to initialize our earlier parametric Local All-Pass (LAP) registration algorithm, the results obtained improve significantly over the state of the art.

Physiological motion, such as cardiac and respiratory motion, during Magnetic Resonance (MR) image acquisition can cause image artifacts. Motion correction techniques have been proposed to compensate for these types of motion during thoracic scans, relying on accurate motion estimation from undersampled motion-resolved reconstruction. A particular interest and challenge lie in the derivation of reliable non-rigid motion fields from the undersampled motion-resolved data. Motion estimation is usually formulated in image space via diffusion, parametric-spline, or optical flow methods. However, image-based registration can be impaired by remaining aliasing artifacts due to the undersampled motion-resolved reconstruction. In this work, we describe a formalism to perform non-rigid registration directly in the sampled Fourier space, i.e. k-space. We propose a deep-learning based approach to perform fast and accurate non-rigid registration from the undersampled k-space data. The basic working principle originates from the Local All-Pass (LAP) technique, a recently introduced optical flow-based registration. The proposed LAPNet is compared against traditional and deep learning image-based registrations and tested on fully-sampled and highly-accelerated (with two undersampling strategies) 3D respiratory motion-resolved MR images in a cohort of 40 patients with suspected liver or lung metastases and 25 healthy subjects. The proposed LAPNet provided consistent and superior performance to image-based approaches throughout different sampling trajectories and acceleration factors.

We consider physical fields induced by a finite number of instantaneous diffusion sources, which we sample using a mobile sensor, along unknown trajectories composed of multiple linear segments. We address the problem of estimating the sources, as well as the trajectory of the mobile sensor. Within this framework, we propose a method for localizing sources of unknown amplitudes, and known activation times. The reconstruction method we propose maps the measurements obtained using the mobile sensor to a sequence of generalized field samples. From these generalized samples, we can then retrieve the locations of the sources as well as the trajectory of the sensor (up to a linear geometric transformation).

In the theory of linear models, the degrees of freedom (DOF) of an estimator play a pivotal role in risk estimation, as it quantifies the complexity of a statistical modeling procedure. Considering the total-variation (TV) regularization, we present a theoretical study of the DOF in Stein’s unbiased risk estimate (SURE), under a very mild assumption. First, from the duality perspective, we give an analytic expression of the exact TV solution, with identification of its support. The closed-form expression of the DOF is derived based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. It is also shown that the DOF is upper bounded by the nullity of a sub-analysis-matrix. The theoretical analysis is finally validated by the numerical tests on image recovery.

Image registration is a required step in many practical applications that involve the acquisition of multiple related images. In this paper, we propose a methodology to deal with both the geometric and intensity transformations in the image registration problem. The main idea is to modify an accurate and fast elastic registration algorithm (Local All-Pass-LAP) so that it returns a parametric displacement field, and to estimate the intensity changes by fitting another parametric expression. Although we demonstrate the methodology using a low-order parametric model, our approach is highly flexible and easily allows substantially richer parametrisations, while requiring only limited extra computation cost. In addition, we propose two novel quantitative criteria to evaluate the accuracy of the alignment of two images ("salience correlation") and the number of degrees of freedom ("parsimony") of a displacement field, respectively. Experimental results on both synthetic and real images demonstrate the high accuracy and computational efficiency of our methodology. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the resulting displacement fields are more parsimonious than the ones obtained in other state-of-the-art image registration approaches.

Computing the convolution between a 2D signal and a corresponding filter with variable orientations is a basic problem that arises in various tasks ranging from low level image processing (e.g. ridge/edge detection) to high level computer vision (e.g. pattern recognition). Through decades of research, there still lacks an efficient method for solving this problem. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the perspective of approximation by considering the following problem: what is the optimal basis for approximating all rotated versions of a given bivariate function? Surprisingly, solely minimising the L2-approximation-error leads to a rotation-covariant linear expansion, which we name Fourier-Argand representation. This representation presents two major advantages: 1) rotation-covariance of the basis, which implies a "strong steerability" - rotating by an angle α corresponds to multiplying each basis function by a complex scalar e-ikα; 2) optimality of the Fourier-Argand basis, which ensures a few number of basis functions suffice to accurately approximate complicated patterns and highly direction-selective filters. We show the relation between the Fourier-Argand representation and the Radon transform, leading to an efficient implementation of the decomposition for digital filters. We also show how to retrieve accurate orientation of local structures/patterns using a fast frequency estimation algorithm.

Super-resolution is the art of recovering spikes from their low-pass projections. Over the last decade specifically, several significant advancements linked with mathematical guarantees and recovery algorithms have been made. Most super-resolution algorithms rely on a two-step procedure: deconvolution followed by high-resolution frequency estimation. However, for this to work, exact bandwidth of low-pass filter must be known; an assumption that is central to the mathematical model of super-resolution. On the flip side, when it comes to practice, smoothness rather than bandlimitedness is a much more applicable property. Since smooth pulses decay quickly, one may still capitalize on the existing super-resolution algorithms provided that the essential bandwidth is known. This problem has not been discussed in literature and is the theme of our work. In this paper, we start with an experiment to show that super-resolution in the presence of noise is sensitive to bandwidth selection. This raises the question of how to select the optimal bandwidth. To this end, we propose a bandwidth selection criterion which works by minimizing a proxy of estimation error that is dependent of bandwidth. Our criterion is easy to compute, and gives reasonable results for experimentally acquired data, thus opening interesting avenues for further investigation, for instance the relationship to Cramér-Rao bounds.

While sensors have been widely used in various applications, an essential current trend of research consists of collecting and fusing the information that comes from many sensors. In this paper, on the contrary, we would like to concentrate on a unique mobile sensor; our goal is to unveil the multidimensional information entangled within a stream of one-dimensional data, called FRI Sensing. Our key finding is that, even if we don't have any position knowledge of the moving sensors, it's still possible to reconstruct the sampling trajectory (up to a linear transformation and a shift), and then reconstruct an image that represents the physical sampling field under certain hypotheses. We further investigate the reconstruction hypotheses and propose novel algorithms that could make this 1D to 2D reconstruction feasible. Experiments show that the proposed approach retrieves the sampling image and trajectory accurately under the developed hypotheses. This method can be applied to geolocation localization applications, such as indoor localization and submarine navigation. Moreover, we show that the proposed algorithms have the potential to visualize the one-dimensional signal, which may not be sampled from a real 2D/3D physical field (e.g. speech and text signals), as a two- or three-dimensional image.

High-quality video frame interpolation often necessitates accurate motion estimation, which can be obtained using modern optical flow methods. In this paper, we use the recently proposed Local All-Pass (LAP) algorithm to compute the optical flow between two consecutive frames. The resulting flow field is used to perform interpolation using cubic splines. We compare the interpolation results against a well-known optical flow estimation algorithm as well as against a recent con-volutional neural network scheme for video frame interpolation. Qualitative and quantitative results show that the LAP algorithm performs fast, high-quality video frame interpolation, and perceptually outperforms the neural network and the Lucas-Kanade method on a variety of test sequences.

Recently, the plug-and-play priors (PPP) have been a popular technique for image reconstruction. Based on the basic iterative thresholding scheme, we in this paper propose a new iterative SURE-LET deconvolution algorithm with a plug-in BM3D denoiser. To optimize the deconvolution process, we linearly parametrize the thresholding function by using multiple BM3D denoisers as elementary functions. The key contributions of our approach are: (1) the linear combination of several BM3D denoisers with different (but fixed) parameters, which avoids the manual adjustment of a single non-linear parameter; (2) linear parametrization makes the minimization of Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE) finally boil down to solving a linear system of equations, leading to a very fast and exact optimization during each iteration. In particular, the SURE of BM3D denoiser is approximately evaluated by finite-difference Monte-Carlo technique. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm, in average, achieves better deconvolution performance than other state-of-the-art methods, both numerically and visually.

Image registration is a significant step in a wide range of practical applications and it is a fundamental problem in various computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a highly accurate and fast parametric registration method for mobile phone photos. The proposed algorithm is based on a fast and accurate elastic registration algorithm, the Local All-Pass (LAP) algorithm, which performs in a coarse-to-fine manner. At each iteration, the LAP displacement field is fitted by a parametric model. Thus the image registration problem is equivalent to finding a few parameters to describe the displacement field. The fitting step can be performed very efficiently by solving a linear system of equations. In terms of the fitting model, it is easy to change the type of models to do the parametric fitting for specific applications. Experimental results on both synthetic and real images demonstrate the high accuracy and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

Detection of curves (e.g., ridges) from very noisy images is an important yet challenging task in photon-starved imaging applications (e.g., nuclear imaging modalities, fluorescence/electron microscopy, radioastronomy, first photon/light-in-flight imaging).In this paper, we exploit the consistency of the image along the curve, i.e., the fact that the image changes slowly when we move along the curve-"locally" laminar images. We compute a sequence of complex scalars that we call Fourier-Argand moments, and show that the direction of variation of a laminar image is purely encoded in the phase of these moments. In particular, focusing on ridges located at the center of the image, we show that using these moments altogether in a frequency estimation algorithm provides a very accurate and highly robust estimate of the direction of the ridge: we demonstrate this accuracy for noise levels as high as -10dB.We then show how to detect curves-i.e., local ridges-by computing the Fourier Argand moments within a sliding window across the image, and design a consistency map whose thresholding allows to keep only the pixels on the curve.Numerical experiments on both synthetic images and real images (low light photography) demonstrate the accuracy and robustness to noise of the proposed method, compared to a state of the art method.

Estimation of conduction velocity (CV) is an important task in the analysis of surface electromyography (sEMG). The problem can be framed as estimation of a time-varying delay (TVD) between electrode recordings. In this paper we present an algorithm which incorporates information from multiple electrodes into a single TVD estimation. The algorithm uses a common all-pass filter to relate two groups of signals at a local level. We also address a current limitation of CV estimators by providing an automated way of identifying the innervation zone from a set of electrode recordings, thus allowing incorporation of the entire array into the estimation. We validate the algorithm on both synthetic and real sEMG data with results showing the proposed algorithm is both robust and accurate.

Recently, total variation (TV)-based regularization has become a standard technique for signal denoising. The reconstruction quality is generally sensitive to the value of regularization parameter. In this work, based on Cham-bolle's algorithm, we develop two data-driven optimization schemes based on minimization of Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE)-statistically equivalent to mean squared error (MSE). First, we propose a recursive evaluation of SURE to monitor the estimation error during Chambolle's iteration; the optimal value is then identified by the minimum SURE. Second, for fast optimization, we perform alternating update between regularization parameter and solution within Chambolle's iteration. We exemplify the proposed methods with both 1-D and 2-D signal denoising. Numerical experiments show that the proposed methods lead to highly accurate estimate of regularization parameter and nearly optimal denoising performance.

A proper selection of regularization parameter is essential for regularization-based image deconvolution. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a new form of generalized cross validation (GCV) as a criterion for this optimal selection. Incorporating a nil-trace non-linear estimate, we develop this new GCV based on Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE)-an unbiased estimate of mean squared error (MSE). The key advantage of this GCV over SURE is that it does not require the knowledge of noise variance. We exemplify this criterion with both Tikhonov regularization and ℓ1-based sparse deconvolution. In particular, we develop a recursive evaluation of GCV for the ℓ1-estimate based on iterative soft-thresholding (IST) algorithm. Numerical experiments demonstrate the nearly optimal parameter selection and negligible loss of its resultant deconvolution quality.

This paper deals with the estimation of a deformation that describes the geometric transformation between two images. To solve this problem, we propose a novel framework that relies upon the brightness consistency hypothesis-a pixel's intensity is maintained throughout the transformation. Instead of assuming small distortion and linearizing the problem (e.g. via Taylor Series expansion), we propose to interpret the brightness hypothesis as an all-pass filtering relation between the two images. The key advantages of this new interpretation are that no restrictions are placed on the amplitude of the deformation or on the spatial variations of the images. Moreover, by converting the all-pass filtering to a linear forward-backward filtering relation, our solution to the estimation problem equates to solving a linear system of equations, which leads to a highly efficient implementation. Using this framework, we develop a fast algorithm that relates one image to another, on a local level, using an all-pass filter and then extracts the deformation from the filter-hence the name "Local All-Pass" (LAP) algorithm. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated on a variety of synthetic and real deformations that are found in applications, such as image registration and motion estimation. In particular, when compared with a selection of image registration algorithms, the LAP obtains very accurate results for significantly reduced computation time and is very robust to noise corruption.

We propose a non-iterative image deconvolution algorithm for data corrupted by Poisson or mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise. Many applications involve such a problem, ranging from astronomical to biological imaging. We parameterize the deconvolution process as a linear combination of elementary functions, termed as linear expansion of thresholds. This parameterization is then optimized by minimizing a robust estimate of the true mean squared error, the Poisson unbiased risk estimate. Each elementary function consists of a Wiener filtering followed by a pointwise thresholding of undecimated Haar wavelet coefficients. In contrast to existing approaches, the proposed algorithm merely amounts to solving a linear system of equations, which has a fast and exact solution. Simulation experiments over different types of convolution kernels and various noise levels indicate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques, in terms of both restoration quality and computational complexity. Finally, we present some results on real confocal fluorescence microscopy images and demonstrate the potential applicability of the proposed method for improving the quality of these images.We propose a non-iterative image deconvolution algorithm for data corrupted by Poisson or mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise. Many applications involve such a problem, ranging from astronomical to biological imaging. We parameterize the deconvolution process as a linear combination of elementary functions, termed as linear expansion of thresholds. This parameterization is then optimized by minimizing a robust estimate of the true mean squared error, the Poisson unbiased risk estimate. Each elementary function consists of a Wiener filtering followed by a pointwise thresholding of undecimated Haar wavelet coefficients. In contrast to existing approaches, the proposed algorithm merely amounts to solving a linear system of equations, which has a fast and exact solution. Simulation experiments over different types of convolution kernels and various noise levels indicate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques, in terms of both restoration quality and computational complexity. Finally, we present some results on real confocal fluorescence microscopy images and demonstrate the potential applicability of the proposed method for improving the quality of these images.

The field of signal processing is replete with exemplary problems where the measurements amount to time-delayed and amplitude scaled echoes of some template function or a pulse. When the inter-pulse spacing is favorable, something as primitive as a matched filter serves the purpose of identifying time-delays and amplitudes. When the inter-pulse spacing poses an algorithmic challenge, high-resolution methods such as finite-rate-of-innovation (FRI) may be used. However, in many practical cases of interest, the template function may be distorted due to physical properties of propagation and transmission. Such cases can not be handled well by existing signal models. Inspired by problems in spectroscopy, radar, photoacoustic imaging and ultra-wide band arrays, on which we base our case studies, in this work we take a step towards recovering spikes from time-varying pulses. To this end, we re-purpose the FRI method and extend its utility to the case of phase distorted pulses. Application of our algorithm on the above-mentioned case studies results in substantial improvement in peak-signal-to-noise ratio, thus promising interesting future directions.

Blur estimation is critical to blind image deconvolution. In this work, by taking Gaussian kernel as an example, we propose an approach to estimate the blur size for photon-limited images. This estimation is based on the minimization of a novel criterion, blur-PURE (Poisson unbiased risk estimate), which makes use of the Poisson noise statistics of the measurement. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in various scenarios. This approach can be then plugged into our recent PURE-LET deconvolution algorithm, and an example on real fluorescence microscopy is presented.

We propose an efficient method for image registration based on iteratively fitting a parametric model to the output of an elastic registration. It combines the flexibility of elastic registration — able to estimate complex deformations — with the robustness of parametric registration — able to estimate very large displacement. Our approach is made feasible by using the recent Local All-Pass (LAP) algorithm; a fast and accurate filter-based method for estimating the local deformation between two images. Moreover, at each iteration we fit a linear parametric model to the local deformation which is equivalent to solving a linear system of equations (very fast and efficient). We use a quadratic polynomial model however the framework can easily be extended to more complicated models. The significant advantage of the proposed method is its robustness to model mis-match (e.g. noise and blurring). Experimental results on synthetic images and real images demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is highly accurate and outperforms a selection of image registration approaches.

Video phylogeny research about joint analysis of correlated video sequences has shown the possibility of developing interesting forensic applications. As an example, it is possible to study the provenance of near-duplicate (ND) video sequences, i.e., videos generated from the same original one through content preserving transformations. To perform this kind of analysis, accurate detection of ND videos is paramount. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for ND video detection and clustering in a challenging setup. Specifically, we analyze a scenario in which many videos, depicting the same event, are recorded by different users. This situation is critical as non-ND videos acquired from very close viewpoints run the risk of being incorrectly detected as ND. The proposed approach leverages on robust hashing properties and the concept of sensor noise traces.

Recently, sampling theory has been broadened to include a class of non-bandlimited signals that possess finite rate of innovation (FRI). In this paper, we consider the problem of determining the minimum rate of innovation (RI) in a noisy setting. First, we adapt a recent model-fitting algorithm for FRI recovery and demonstrate that it achieves the Cramer-Rao bounds. Using this algorithm, we then present a framework to estimate the minimum RI based on fitting the sparsest model to the noisy samples whilst satisfying a mean squared error (MSE) criterion - a signal is recovered if the output MSE is less than the input MSE. Specifically, given a RI, we use the MSE criterion to judge whether our model-fitting has been a success or a failure. Using this output, we present a Dichotomic algorithm that performs a binary search for the minimum RI and demonstrate that it obtains a sparser RI estimate than an existing information criterion approach.

Sparsity-promoting regularization is often formulated as ℓv-penalized minimization (0 <; v ≤ 1), which can be efficiently solved by iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS). The reconstruction quality is generally sensitive to the value of regularization parameter. In this work, for accurate recovery, we develop two data-driven optimization schemes based on minimization of Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE). First, we propose a recursive method for computing SURE for a given IRLS iterate, which enables us to unbiasedly evaluate the reconstruction error, and select the optimal value of regularization parameter. Second, for fast optimization, we parametrize each IRLS iterate as a linear combination of few elementary functions (LET), and solve the linear weights by minimizing SURE. Numerical experiments show that iterating this process leads to higher reconstruction accuracy with remarkably faster computational speed than standard IRLS.

We propose a non-iterative image deconvolution algorithm for data corrupted by Poisson noise. Many applications involve such a problem, ranging from astronomical to biological imaging. We parametrize the deconvolution process as a linear combination of elementary functions, termed as linear expansion of thresholds (LET). This parametrization is then optimized by minimizing a robust estimate of the mean squared error, the “Poisson unbiased risk estimate (PURE)”. Each elementary function consists of a Wiener filtering followed by a pointwise thresholding of undecimated Haar wavelet coefficients. In contrast to existing approaches, the proposed algorithm merely amounts to solving a linear system of equations which has a fast and exact solution. Simulation experiments over various noise levels indicate that the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques, in terms of both restoration quality and computational time.

The optical flow is a velocity field that describes the motion of pixels within a sequence (or set) of images. Its estimation plays an important role in areas such as motion compensation, object tracking and image registration. In this paper, we present a novel framework to estimate the optical flow using local all-pass filters. Instead of using the optical flow equation, the framework is based on relating one image to another, on a local level, using an all-pass filter and then extracting the optical flow from the filter. Using this framework, we present a fast novel algorithm for estimating a smoothly varying optical flow, which we term the Local All-Pass (LAP) algorithm. We demonstrate that this algorithm is consistent and accurate, and that it outperforms three state-of-the-art algorithms when estimating constant and smoothly varying flows. We also show initial competitive results for real images.

We propose a novel edge detection algorithm with sub-pixel accuracy based on annihilation of signals with finite rate of innovation [1, 2]. We show that the Fourier domain annihilation equations can be interpreted as spatial domain multiplications. From this new perspective, we obtain an accurate estimation of the edge model by assuming a simple parametric form within each localised block. Further, we build a locally adaptive global mask function (i.e, our edge model) for the whole image. The mask function is then used as an edge-preserving constraint in further processing. Numerical experiments on both edge localisations and image up-sampling show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which out-performs state-of-the-art method.

Estimating the displacements between two images is often addressed using a small displacement assumption, which leads to what is known as the optical flow equation. We study the quality of the underlying approximation for the recently developed Local All-Pass (LAP) optical flow algorithm, which is based on another approach - displacements result from filtering. While the simplest version of LAP computes only first-order differences, we show that the order of LAP approximation is quadratic, unlike standard optical flow equation based algorithms for which this approximation is only linear. More generally, the order of approximation of the LAP algorithm is twice larger than the differentiation order involved. The key step in the derivation is the use of Padé approximants.

Accurate and robust spot tracking is a necessary tool for quantitative motion analysis in fluorescence microscopy images. Few trackers however consider the underlying dynamics present in biological systems. For example, the collective motion of cells often exhibits both fast dynamics, i.e. Brownian motion, and slow dynamics, i.e. time-invariant stationary motion. In this paper, we propose a novel, multi-frame, tracker that exploits this stationary motion. More precisely, we first estimate the stationary motion and then use it to guide the spot tracker. We obtain the stationary motion by adapting a recent optical flow algorithm that relates one image to another locally using an all-pass filter. We perform this operation over all the image frames simultaneously and estimate a single, stationary optical flow. We compare the proposed tracker with two existing techniques and show that our approach is more robust to high noise and varying structure. In addition, we also show initial experiments on real microscopy images.

We address the problem of denoising images corrupted by multiplicative noise. The noise is assumed to follow a Gamma distribution. Compared with additive noise distortion, the effect of multiplicative noise on the visual quality of images is quite severe. We consider the mean-square error (MSE) cost function and derive an expression for an unbiased estimate of the MSE. The resulting multiplicative noise unbiased risk estimator is referred to as MURE. The denoising operation is performed in the wavelet domain by considering the image-domain MURE. The parameters of the denoising function (typically, a shrinkage of wavelet coefficients) are optimized for by minimizing MURE. We show that MURE is accurate and close to the oracle MSE. This makes MURE-based image denoising reliable and on par with oracle-MSE-based estimates. Analogous to the other popular risk estimation approaches developed for additive, Poisson, and chi-squared noise degradations, the proposed approach does not assume any prior on the underlying noise-free image. We report denoising results for various noise levels and show that the quality of denoising obtained is on par with the oracle result and better than that obtained using some state-of-the-art denoisers.

We propose an unbiased estimate of a filtered version of the mean squared error--the blur-SURE (Stein's unbiased risk estimate)--as a novel criterion for estimating an unknown point spread function (PSF) from the degraded image only. The PSF is obtained by minimizing this new objective functional over a family of Wiener processings. Based on this estimated blur kernel, we then perform nonblind deconvolution using our recently developed algorithm. The SURE-based framework is exemplified with a number of parametric PSF, involving a scaling factor that controls the blur size. A typical example of such parametrization is the Gaussian kernel. The experimental results demonstrate that minimizing the blur-SURE yields highly accurate estimates of the PSF parameters, which also result in a restoration quality that is very similar to the one obtained with the exact PSF, when plugged into our recent multi-Wiener SURE-LET deconvolution algorithm. The highly competitive results obtained outline the great potential of developing more powerful blind deconvolution algorithms based on SURE-like estimates.

Recently, classical sampling theory has been broadened to include a class of non-bandlimited signals that possess finite rate of innovation (FRI). In this paper we consider the reconstruction of a periodic stream of Diracs from noisy samples. We demonstrate that its noiseless FRI samples can be represented as a ratio of two polynomials. Using this structure as a model, we propose recovering the FRI signal using a model fitting approach rather than an annihilation method. We present an algorithm that fits this model to the noisy samples and demonstrate that it has low computation cost and is more reliable than two state-of-the-art methods.

How vowels are organized cortically has previously been stud-ied using auditory evoked potentials (AEPs), one focus of which is to determine whether perceptual distance could be inferred using AEP components. The present study extends this line of research by adopting a machine-learning framework to classify evoked responses to four synthetic mid-vowels differing only in second formant frequency (F2 = 840, 1200, 1680, and 2280 Hz). 6 subjects attended 4 EEG sessions each on separate days. Clas-sifiers were trained using time-domain data in successive time-windows of various sizes. Results were the most accurate when a window of about 80 ms was used. By integrating the scores from individual classifiers, the maximum mean binary classifi-cation rates improved to 70 % (10 trials) and 77 % (20 trials). To assess how well perceptual distances among the vowels were reflected in our results, discriminability indices (d′) were com-puted using both the behavioral results in a screening test and the classification results. It was found that the two set of indices were significantly correlated. The pair that was the most (least) discriminable behaviorally was also the most (least) classifiable neurally. Our results support the use of classification methodol-ogy for developing a neural measure of perceptual distance. Index Terms: vowel perception, electroencephalography, per-ceptual distance, classification, machine learning

We design two complex filters {h[n], g[n])} for an orthogonal filter bank structure based on two atom functions {ρ0α(t), ρ1/2α(t)}, such that: 1) they generate an orthonormal multiwavelet basis; 2) the two complex conjugate wavelets are Hilbert wavelets, i.e., their frequency responses are supported either on positive or negative frequencies; and 3) the two scaling functions are real. The developed complex wavelet transform (CWT) is non-redundant, nearly shift-invariant, and distinguishable for diagonal features. The distinguishability in diagonal features is demonstrated by comparison with real discrete wavelet transform.

This paper proposes a novel algorithmic framework to solve image restoration problems under sparsity assumptions. As usual, the reconstructed image is the minimum of an objective functional that consists of a data fidelity term and an ℓ₁ regularization. However, instead of estimating the reconstructed image that minimizes the objective functional directly, we focus on the restoration process that maps the degraded measurements to the reconstruction. Our idea amounts to parameterize the process as a linear combination of few elementary thresholding functions (LET) and to solve the linear weighting coefficients by minimizing the objective functional. It is then possible to update the thresholding functions and to iterate this process ( i-LET). The key advantage of such a linear parametrization is that the problem size reduces dramatically--each time we only need to solve an optimization problem over the dimension of the linear coefficients (typically less than 10) instead of the whole image dimension. With the elementary thresholding functions satisfying certain constraints, a global convergence of the iterated LET algorithm is guaranteed. Experiments on several test images over a wide range of noise levels and different types of convolution kernels clearly indicate that the proposed framework usually outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both the CPU time and the number of iterations.

In this paper, we propose a novel deconvolution algorithm based on the minimization of a regularized Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE), which is a good estimate of the mean squared error. We linearly parametrize the deconvolution process by using multiple Wiener filters as elementary functions, followed by undecimated Haar-wavelet thresholding. Due to the quadratic nature of SURE and the linear parametrization, the deconvolution problem finally boils down to solving a linear system of equations, which is very fast and exact. The linear coefficients, i.e., the solution of the linear system of equations, constitute the best approximation of the optimal processing on the Wiener-Haar-threshold basis that we consider. In addition, the proposed multi-Wiener SURE-LET approach is applicable for both periodic and symmetric boundary conditions, and can thus be used in various practical scenarios. The very competitive (both in computation time and quality) results show that the proposed algorithm, which can be interpreted as a kind of nonlinear Wiener processing, can be used as a basic tool for building more sophisticated deconvolution algorithms.

This paper consider the problem of relaxing the spatial coverage requirement on the mechanical rotation in the direction finding (DF) approach based on the received power measurements from single antenna pointing to different directions. Under incomplete spatial coverage, we show that the least square (LS) solution used to transform the problem into its spectral form is no longer accurate due to its ill-conditioned system matrix. To overcome this, we propose an approach based on spatial remodeling of the spatial power measurements such that its spatial periodicity can be adjusted according to the spatial coverage. The approach also incorporates the Tikhonov regularization in calculating the LS solution based on the new system matrix. Upon arriving at the new spectral form, the Cadzow-annihilating filter method can then be used to estimate the direction-of-arrival. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to show the efficacy of the proposed method.

We propose a novel deconvolution algorithm based on the minimization of Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE). We linearly parametrize the deconvolution process by using multiple Wiener filterings as elementary functions, followed by undecimated Haar-wavelet thresholding. The key contributions of our approach are: 1) the linear combination of several Wiener filters with different (but fixed) regularization parameters, which avoids the manual adjustment of a single nonlinear parameter; 2) the use of linear parameterization, which makes the SURE minimization finally boil down to solving a linear system of equations, leading to a very fast and exact optimization of the whole deconvolution process. The results obtained on standard test images show that our algorithm favorably compares with the other state-of-the-art deconvolution methods in both speed and quality.

n this article we derive an unbiased expression for the expected mean-squared error associated with continuously differentiable estimators of the noncentrality parameter of a chisquare random variable. We then consider the task of denoising squared-magnitude magnetic resonance image data, which are well modeled as independent noncentral chi-square random variables on two degrees of freedom. We consider two broad classes of linearly parameterized shrinkage estimators that can be optimized using our risk estimate, one in the general context of undecimated filterbank transforms, and another in the specific case of the unnormalized Haar wavelet transform. The resultant algorithms are computationally tractable and improve upon most state-of-the-art methods for both simulated and actual magnetic resonance image data.

This paper considers the problem of extending the single antenna power measurements based direction finding to the two-dimensional (2D) case, and proposes a method to estimate the azimuth-elevation direction-of-arrival (DOA) from a matrix of received power. Exploiting the fact that the azimuth-elevation antenna pattern is 2D bandlimited, the problem can be transformed into a 2D spectral analysis problem. The proposed method first decomposes the 2D spectral analysis problem into one-dimensional case and then solved them independently. As the solution does not ensure that the estimated azimuth and elevation is in correct order, the solution is subjected to permutation ambiguity. This can then be solved by finding the permutation that best matches the 2D spectral representation. Simulation results demonstrating the high-resolution capability of the proposed method in two-source case and the effectiveness in fivesource case are also presented in this paper.

Fractional sample interpolation with FIR filters is commonly used for motion compensated prediction (MCP). The FIR filtering can be viewed as a signal decomposition using restricted basis functions. The concept of generalized interpolation provides a greater degree of freedom for selecting basis functions. We implemented generalized interpolation using a combination of short IIR and FIR filters. An efficient multiplication-free design of the algorithm that is suited for hardware implementation is shown. Compared to a 6-tap FIR interpolation filter, average rate savings of 3.1% are observed. A detailed analysis of the complexity and memory bandwidth cycles compared to existing interpolation techniques for MCP is provided.

We focus on image restoration that consists in regularizing a quadratic data-fidelity term with the standard ℓ1sparse-enforcing norm. We propose a novel algorithmic approach to solve this optimization problem. Our idea amounts to approximating the result of the restoration as a linear sum of basic thresholds (e.g. soft-thresholds) weighted by unknown coefficients. The few coefficients of this expansion are obtained by minimizing the equivalent low-dimensional ℓ1-norm regularized objective function, which can be solved efficiently with standard convex optimization techniques, e.g. iterative reweighted least square (IRLS). By iterating this process, we claim that we reach the global minimum of the objective function. Experimentally we discover that very few iterations are required before we reach the convergence.

We propose a general methodology (PURE-LET) to design and optimize a wide class of transform-domain thresholding algorithms for denoising images corrupted by mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise. We express the denoising process as a linear expansion of thresholds (LET) that we optimize by relying on a purely data-adaptive unbiased estimate of the mean-squared error (MSE), derived in a non-Bayesian framework (PURE: Poisson-Gaussian unbiased risk estimate). We provide a practical approximation of this theoretical MSE estimate for the tractable optimization of arbitrary transform-domain thresholding. We then propose a pointwise estimator for undecimated filterbank transforms, which consists of subband-adaptive thresholding functions with signal-dependent thresholds that are globally optimized in the image domain. We finally demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques that are specifically tailored to the estimation of Poisson intensities. We also present denoising results obtained on real images of low-count fluorescence microscopy.

We propose a novel algorithm for denoising Poisson-corrupted images, that performs a signal-adaptive thresholding of the undecimated Haar wavelet coefficients. A Poisson's unbiased MSE estimate is devised and adapted to arbitrary transform-domain pointwise processing. This prior-free quadratic measure of quality is then used to globally optimize a linearly parameterized subband-adaptive thresholding, which accounts for the signal-dependent noise variance. We demonstrate the qualitative and computational competitiveness of the resulting denoising algorithm through comprehensive comparisons with some state-of-the-art multiscale techniques specifically designed for Poisson intensity estimation. We also show promising denoising results obtained on low-count fluorescence microscopy images.

This paper presents a simple yet effective color filter array (CFA) interpolation algorithm. It is based on a linear interpolating kernel, but operates on YUV space, which results in a nontrivial boost on the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of red and blue channels. The algorithm can be implemented efficiently. At the end of the paper, we present its performance compared with nonlinear interpolation methods and show that it's competitive even among state-of-the-art CFA demosaicing algorithms.

We propose an efficient orthonormal wavelet-domain video denoising algorithm based on an appropriate integration of motion compensation into an adapted version of our recently devised Stein's unbiased risk estimator-linear expansion of thresholds (SURE-LET) approach. To take full advantage of the strong spatio-temporal correlations of neighboring frames, a global motion compensation followed by a selective block-matching is first applied to adjacent frames, which increases their temporal correlations without distorting the interframe noise statistics. Then, a multiframe interscale wavelet thresholding is performed to denoise the current central frame. The simulations we made on standard grayscale video sequences for various noise levels demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution in reducing additive white Gaussian noise. Obtained at a lighter computational load, our results are even competitive with most state-of-the-art redundant wavelet-based techniques. By using a cycle-spinning strategy, our algorithm is in fact able to outperform these methods.

We propose an extension of the recently devised SURE-LET grayscale denoising approach for multichannel images. Assuming additive Gaussian white noise, the unknown linear parameters of a transform-domain/wwfwwe multichannel thresholding are globally optimized by minimizing Stein's unbiased MSE estimate (SURE) in the image-domain. Using the undecimated wavelet transform, we demonstrate the efficiency of this approach for denoising color images by comparing our results with two other state-of-the-art denoising algorithms.

We consider the problem of optimizing the parameters of an arbitrary denoising algorithm by minimizing Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE) which provides a means of assessing the true mean-squared-error (MSE) purely from the measured data assuming that it is corrupted by Gaussian noise. To accomplish this, we propose a novel Monte-Carlo technique based on a black-box approach which enables the user to compute SURE for an arbitrary denoising algorithm with some specific parameter setting. Our method only requires the response of the denoising algorithm to additional input noise and does not ask for any information about the functional form of the corresponding denoising operator. This, therefore, permits SURE-based optimization of a wide variety of denoising algorithms (global-iterative, pointwise, etc). We present experimental results to justify our claims.

A fast computational method is given for the Fourier transform of the polyharmonic B-spline autocorrelation sequence in d dimensions. The approximation error is exponentially decaying with the number of terms taken into account. The algorithm improves speed upon a simple truncated-sum approach. Moreover, it is virtually independent of the spline's order. The autocorrelation filter directly serves for various tasks related to polyharmonic splines, such as interpolation, orthonormalization, and wavelet basis design.

We propose a vector/matrix extension of our denoising algorithm initially developed for grayscale images, in order to efficiently process multichannel (e.g., color) images. This work follows our recently published SURE-LET approach where the denoising algorithm is parameterized as a linear expansion of thresholds (LET) and optimized using Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE). The proposed wavelet thresholding function is pointwise and depends on the coefficients of same location in the other channels, as well as on their parents in the coarser wavelet subband. A nonredundant, orthonormal, wavelet transform is first applied to the noisy data, followed by the (subband-dependent) vector-valued thresholding of individual multichannel wavelet coefficients which are finally brought back to the image domain by inverse wavelet transform. Extensive comparisons with the state-of-the-art multiresolution image denoising algorithms indicate that despite being nonredundant, our algorithm matches the quality of the best redundant approaches, while maintaining a high computational efficiency and a low CPU/memory consumption. An online Java demo illustrates these assertions.

We consider the problem of optimizing the parameters of a given denoising algorithm for restoration of a signal corrupted by white Gaussian noise. To achieve this, we propose to minimize Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE) which provides a means of assessing the true mean-squared error (MSE) purely from the measured data without need for any knowledge about the noise-free signal. Specifically, we present a novel Monte-Carlo technique which enables the user to calculate SURE for an arbitrary denoising algorithm characterized by some specific parameter setting. Our method is a black-box approach which solely uses the response of the denoising operator to additional input noise and does not ask for any information about its functional form. This, therefore, permits the use of SURE for optimization of a wide variety of denoising algorithms. We justify our claims by presenting experimental results for SURE-based optimization of a series of popular image-denoising algorithms such as total-variation denoising, wavelet soft-thresholding, and Wiener filtering/smoothing splines. In the process, we also compare the performance of these methods. We demonstrate numerically that SURE computed using the new approach accurately predicts the true MSE for all the considered algorithms. We also show that SURE uncovers the optimal values of the parameters in all cases.

Frequency domain optical coherence tomography (FDOCT) is a new technique that is well-suited for fast imaging of biological specimens, as well as non-biological objects. The measurements are in the frequency domain, and the objective is to retrieve an artifact-free spatial domain description of the specimen. In this paper, we develop a new technique for model-based retrieval of spatial domain data from the frequency domain data. We use a piecewise-constant model for the refractive index profile that is suitable for multi-layered specimens. We show that the estimation of the layered structure parameters can be mapped into a harmonic retrieval problem, which enables us to use high-resolution spectrum estimation techniques. The new technique that we propose is efficient and requires few measurements. We also analyze the effect of additive measurement noise on the algorithm performance. The experimental results show that the technique gives highly accurate parameter estimates. For example, at 25 dB signal-to-noise ratio, the mean square error in the position estimate is about 0.01 % of the actual value.

We propose a new approach to image denoising, based on the image-domain minimization of an estimate of the mean squared error--Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE). Unlike most existing denoising algorithms, using the SURE makes it needless to hypothesize a statistical model for the noiseless image. A key point of our approach is that, although the (nonlinear) processing is performed in a transformed domain--typically, an undecimated discrete wavelet transform, but we also address nonorthonormal transforms--this minimization is performed in the image domain. Indeed, we demonstrate that, when the transform is a "tight" frame (an undecimated wavelet transform using orthonormal filters), separate subband minimization yields substantially worse results. In order for our approach to be viable, we add another principle, that the denoising process can be expressed as a linear combination of elementary denoising processes--linear expansion of thresholds (LET). Armed with the SURE and LET principles, we show that a denoising algorithm merely amounts to solving a linear system of equations which is obviously fast and efficient. Quite remarkably, the very competitive results obtained by performing a simple threshold (image-domain SURE optimized) on the undecimated Haar wavelet coefficients show that the SURE-LET principle has a huge potential.

This paper introduces a new approach to orthonormal wavelet image denoising. Instead of postulating a statistical model for the wavelet coefficients, we directly parametrize the denoising process as a sum of elementary nonlinear processes with unknown weights. We then minimize an estimate of the mean square error between the clean image and the denoised one. The key point is that we have at our disposal a very accurate, statistically unbiased, MSE estimate--Stein's unbiased risk estimate--that depends on the noisy image alone, not on the clean one. Like the MSE, this estimate is quadratic in the unknown weights, and its minimization amounts to solving a linear system of equations. The existence of this a priori estimate makes it unnecessary to devise a specific statistical model for the wavelet coefficients. Instead, and contrary to the custom in the literature, these coefficients are not considered random anymore. We describe an interscale orthonormal wavelet thresholding algorithm based on this new approach and show its near-optimal performance--both regarding quality and CPU requirement--by comparing it with the results of three state-of-the-art nonredundant denoising algorithms on a large set of test images. An interesting fallout of this study is the development of a new, group-delay-based, parent-child prediction in a wavelet dyadic tree.

We consider the problem of estimating a fractional Brownian motion known only from its noisy samples at the integers. We show that the optimal estimator can be expressed using a digital Wiener-like filter followed by a simple time-variant correction accounting for nonstationarity. Moreover, we prove that this estimate lives in a symmetric fractional spline space and give a practical implementation for optimal upsampling of noisy fBm samples by integer factors

Many experimental paradigms in biology aim at studying the response to coordinated stimuli. In dynamic imaging experiments, the observed data is often not straightforward to interpret and not directly measurable in a quantitative fashion. Consequently, the data is typically preprocessed in an ad hoc fashion and the results subjected to a statistical inference at the level of a population. We propose a new framework for analyzing time-lapse images that exploits some a priori knowledge on the type of temporal response and takes advantage of the spatial correlation of the data. This is achieved by processing the data in the wavelet domain and expressing the time course of each wavelet coefficient by a linear model. We end up with a statistical map in the spatial domain for the contrast of interest (i.e., the stimulus response). The feasibility of the method is demonstrated by an example of intrinsic microscopy imaging of mice's brains during coordinated sensory stimulation

Recently, we have proposed a new framework for detecting brain activity from fMRI data, which is based on the spatial discrete wavelet transform. The standard wavelet-based approach performs a statistical test in the wavelet domain, and therefore fails to provide a rigorous statistical interpretation in the spatial domain. The new framework provides an "integrated" approach: the data is processed in the wavelet domain (by thresholding wavelet coefficients), and a suitable statistical testing procedure is applied afterwards in the spatial domain. This method is based on conservative assumptions only and has a strong type-I error control by construction. At the same time, it has a sensitivity comparable to that of SPM. Here, we discuss the extension of our algorithm to the redundant discrete wavelet transform, which provides a shift-invariant detection scheme. The key features of our technique are illustrated with experimental results. An implementation of our framework is available as a toolbox (WSPM) for the SPM2 software

Consider the problem of sampling signals which are not bandlimited, but still have a finite number of degrees of freedom per unit of time, such as, for example, piecewise polynomial or piecewise sinusoidal signals, and call the number of degrees of freedom per unit of time the rate of innovation. Classical sampling theory does not enable a perfect reconstruction of such signals since they are not bandlimited. In this paper, we show that many signals with finite rate of innovation can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed using kernels of compact support and a local reconstruction algorithm. The class of kernels that we can use is very rich and includes functions satisfying strang-fix conditions, exponential splines and functions with rational Fourier transforms. Extension of such results to the 2-dimensional case are also discussed and an application to image super-resolution is presented.

We propose here a new pointwise wavelet thresholding function that incorporates inter-scale dependencies. This non-linear function depends on a set of four linear parameters per sub-band which are set by minimizing Stein's unbiased MSE estimate (SURE). Our approach assumes additive Gaussian white noise. In order for the inter-scale dependencies to be faithfully taken into account, we also develop a rigorous feature alignment processing, that is adapted to arbitrary wavelet filters (e.g. non-symmetric filters). Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of our denoising approach in simulations over a wide range of noise levels for a representative set of standard images.

We introduce a three-dimensional (3-D) parametric active contour algorithm for the shape estimation of DNA molecules from stereo cryo-electron micrographs. We estimate the shape by matching the projections of a 3-D global shape model with the micrographs; we choose the global model as a 3-D filament with a B-spline skeleton and a specified radial profile. The active contour algorithm iteratively updates the B-spline coefficients, which requires us to evaluate the projections and match them with the micrographs at every iteration. Since the evaluation of the projections of the global model is computationally expensive, we propose a fast algorithm based on locally approximating it by elongated blob-like templates. We introduce the concept of projection-steerability and derive a projection-steerable elongated template. Since the two-dimensional projections of such a blob at any 3-D orientation can be expressed as a linear combination of a few basis functions, matching the projections of such a 3-D template involves evaluating a weighted sum of inner products between the basis functions and the micrographs. The weights are simple functions of the 3-D orientation and the inner-products are evaluated efficiently by separable filtering. We choose an internal energy term that penalizes the average curvature magnitude. Since the exact length of the DNA molecule is known a priori, we introduce a constraint energy term that forces the curve to have this specified length. The sum of these energies along with the image energy derived from the matching process is minimized using the conjugate gradients algorithm. We validate the algorithm using real, as well as simulated, data and show that it performs well.

In this correspondence, we consider sampling continuous-time periodic bandlimited signals which contain additive shot noise. The classical sampling scheme does not perfectly recover these particular nonbandlimited signals but only reconstructs a lowpass filtered approximation. By modeling the shot noise as a stream of Dirac pulses, we first show that the sum of a bandlimited signal with a stream of Dirac pulses falls into the class of signals that contain a finite rate of innovation, that is, a finite number of degrees of freedom. Second, by taking into account the degrees of freedom of the bandlimited signal in the sampling and reconstruction scheme developed previously for streams of Dirac pulses, we derive a sampling and perfect reconstruction scheme for the bandlimited signal with additive shot noise.

Recently, it was shown that it is possible to sample classes of signals with finite rate of innovation. These sampling schemes, however, use kernels with infinite support and this leads to complex and unstable reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we show that many signals with finite rate of innovation can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed using kernels of compact support and a local reconstruction algorithm. The class of kernels that we can use is very rich and includes any function satisfying Strang-Fix conditions, exponential splines and functions with rational Fourier transforms.

We present a generalization of the Daubechies wavelet family. The context is that of a non-stationary multiresolution analysis - i.e., a sequence of embedded approximation spaces generated by scaling functions that are not necessarily dilates of one another. The constraints that we impose on these scaling functions are: (1) orthogonality with respect to translation; (2) reproduction of a given set of exponential polynomials; and (3) minimal support. These design requirements lead to the construction of a general family of compactly-supported, orthonormal wavelet-like bases of L/sub 2/. If the exponential parameters are all zero, then one recovers Daubechies wavelets, which are orthogonal to the polynomials of degree (N-1) where N is the order (vanishing-moment property). A fast filterbank implementation of the generalized wavelet transform follows naturally; it is similar to Mallat's algorithm, except that the filters are now scale-dependent. The new transforms offer increased flexibility and are tunable to the spectral characteristics of a wide class of signals.

We investigate the use of quasi-interpolating approximation schemes, to construct an estimate of an unknown function from its given discrete samples. We show theoretically and with practical experiments that such methods perform better than classical interpolation, for the same computation cost.

We provide a new comparison between hexagonal and orthogonal lattices, based on approximation theory. For each of the lattices, we select the "natural" spline basis function as generator for a shift-invariant function space; i.e., the tensor-product B-splines for the orthogonal lattice and the non-separable hex-splines for the hexagonal lattice. For a given order of approximation, we compare the asymptotic constants of the error kernels, which give a very good indication of the approximation quality. We find that the approximation quality on the hexagonal lattice is consistently better, when choosing lattices with the same sampling density. The area sampling gain related to these asymptotic constants quickly converges when the order of approximation of the basis functions increases. Surprisingly, nearest-neighbor interpolation does not allow to profit from the hexagonal grid. For practical purposes, the second-order hex-spline (i.e., constituted by linear patches) appears as a particularly useful candidate to exploit the advantages of hexagonal lattices when representing images on them.

The dilation matrix associated with the three-dimensional (3-D) face-centered cubic (FCC) sublattice is often considered to be the natural 3-D extension of the two-dimensional (2-D) quincunx dilation matrix. However, we demonstrate that both dilation matrices are of different nature: while the 2-D quincunx matrix is a similarity transform, the 3-D FCC matrix is not. More generally, we show that is impossible to obtain a dilation matrix that is a similarity transform and performs downsampling of the Cartesian lattice by a factor of two in more than two dimensions. Furthermore, we observe that the popular 3-D FCC subsampling scheme alternates between three different lattices: Cartesian, FCC, and quincunx. The latter one provides a less isotropic sampling density, a property that should be taken into account to properly orient 3-D data before processing using such a subsampling matrix.

This paper deals with fast image and video segmentation using active contours. Region-based active contours using level sets are powerful techniques for video segmentation, but they suffer from large computational cost. A parametric active contour method based on B-Spline interpolation has been proposed in to highly reduce the computational cost, but this method is sensitive to noise. Here, we choose to relax the rigid interpolation constraint in order to robustify our method in the presence of noise: by using smoothing splines, we trade a tunable amount of interpolation error for a smoother spline curve. We show by experiments on natural sequences that this new flexibility yields segmentation results of higher quality at no additional computational cost. Hence, real-time processing for moving objects segmentation is preserved.

In this paper, we use polyharmonic B-splines to build multidimensional wavelet bases. These functions are nonseparable, multidimensional basis functions that are localized versions of radial basis functions. We show that Rabut's elementary polyharmonic B-splines do not converge to a Gaussian as the order parameter increases, as opposed to their separable B-spline counterparts. Therefore, we introduce a more isotropic localization operator that guarantees this convergence, resulting into the isotropic polyharmonic B-splines. Next, we focus on the two-dimensional quincunx subsampling scheme. This configuration is of particular interest for image processing because it yields a finer scale progression than the standard dyadic approach. However, up until now, the design of appropriate filters for the quincunx scheme has mainly been done using the McClellan transform. In our approach, we start from the scaling functions, which are the polyharmonic B-splines and, as such, explicitly known, and we derive a family of polyharmonic spline wavelets corresponding to different flavors of the semi-orthogonal wavelet transform; e.g., orthonormal, B-spline, and dual. The filters are automatically specified by the scaling relations satisfied by these functions. We prove that the isotropic polyharmonic B-spline wavelet converges to a combination of four Gabor atoms, which are well separated in the frequency domain. We also show that these wavelets are nearly isotropic and that they behave as an iterated Laplacian operator at low frequencies. We describe an efficient fast Fourier transform-based implementation of the discrete wavelet transform based on polyharmonic B-splines.

We present a new result characterized by an exact integral expression for the approximation error between a probability density and an integer shift invariant estimate obtained from its samples. Unlike the Parzen window estimate, this estimate avoids recomputing the complete probability density for each new sample - only a few coefficients are required, making it practical for real-time applications. We also show how to obtain the exact asymptotic behavior of the approximation error when the number of samples increases and provide the trade-off between the number of samples and the sampling step size.

We propose the use of polyharmonic B-splines to build non-separable two-dimensional wavelet bases. The central idea is to base our design on isotropic-polyharmonic B-splines, a new type of polyharmonic B-splines that converge to a Gaussian as the order increases. We opt for the quincunx subsampling scheme which allows us to characterize the wavelet spaces with a single wavelet, the isotropic-polyharmonic B-spline wavelet. Interestingly, this wavelet converges to a combination of four Gabor atoms, which are well separated in the frequency domain. We also briefly discuss our Fourier-based implementation and present some experimental results.

We present a simple, original method to improve piecewise-linear interpolation with uniform knots: we shift the sampling knots by a fixed amount, while enforcing the interpolation property. We determine the theoretical optimal shift that maximizes the quality of our shifted linear interpolation. Surprisingly enough, this optimal value is nonzero and close to 1/5. We confirm our theoretical findings by performing several experiments: a cumulative rotation experiment and a zoom experiment. Both show a significant increase of the quality of the shifted method with respect to the standard one. We also observe that, in these results, we get a quality that is similar to that of the computationally more costly "high-quality" cubic convolution.

Parametric active contour models are one of the preferred approaches for image segmentation because of their computational efficiency and simplicity. However, they have a few drawbacks which limit their performance. In this paper, we identify some of these problems and propose efficient solutions to get around them. The widely-used gradient magnitude-based energy is parameter dependent; its use will negatively affect the parametrization of the curve and, consequently, its stiffness. Hence, we introduce a new edge-based energy that is independent of the parameterization. It is also more robust since it takes into account the gradient direction as well. We express this energy term as a surface integral, thus unifying it naturally with the region-based schemes. The unified framework enables the user to tune the image energy to the application at hand. We show that parametric snakes can guarantee low curvature curves, but only if they are described in the curvilinear abscissa. Since normal curve evolution do not ensure constant arc-length, we propose a new internal energy term that will force this configuration. The curve evolution can sometimes give rise to closed loops in the contour, which will adversely interfere with the optimization algorithm. We propose a curve evolution scheme that prevents this condition.

This paper proposes a new family of bivariate, nonseparable splines, called hex-splines, especially designed for hexagonal lattices. The starting point of the construction is the indicator function of the Voronoi cell, which is used to define in a natural way the first-order hex-spline. Higher order hex-splines are obtained by successive convolutions. A mathematical analysis of this new bivariate spline family is presented. In particular, we derive a closed form for a hex-spline of arbitrary order. We also discuss important properties, such as their Fourier transform and the fact they form a Riesz basis. We also highlight the approximation order. For conventional rectangular lattices, hex-splines revert to classical separable tensor-product B-splines. Finally, some prototypical applications and experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of hex-splines for handling hexagonally sampled data.

We describe a new family of scaling functions, the (/spl alpha/, /spl tau/)-fractional splines, which generate valid multiresolution analyses. These functions are characterized by two real parameters: /spl alpha/, which controls the width of the scaling functions; and /spl tau/, which specifies their position with respect to the grid (shift parameter). This new family is complete in the sense that it is closed under convolutions and correlations. We give the explicit time and Fourier domain expressions of these fractional splines. We prove that the family is closed under generalized fractional differentiations, and, in particular, under the Hilbert transformation. We also show that the associated wavelets are able to whiten 1/f/sup /spl lambda//-type noise, by an adequate tuning of the spline parameters. A fast (and exact) FFT-based implementation of the fractional spline wavelet transform is already available. We show that fractional integration operators can be expressed as the composition of an analysis and a synthesis iterated filterbank.

This paper presents an interpolation method based on shifted versions of two piecewise linear generators, which provides approximation order 2 like usual piecewise-linear interpolation; i.e., this method is able to represent the constant and the ramp exactly. Our interpolation is characterized by two real parameters: /spl tau/, the location of the generators, and /spl alpha/, related to their dissymmetry. By varying these parameters, we show that it is possible to optimize the quality of the approximation, independently of the function to interpolate. We recover the optimal value of shifted-linear interpolation (/spl tau/ = 0.21 and /spl alpha/ = 1) which requires IIR prefiltering, but we also find a new configuration (/spl tau/ = 0.21 and /spl alpha/ = 0.58) which reaches almost the same quality, while requiring FIR filtering only. This new solution is able to greatly reduce the amount of Gibbs oscillations generated in the shifted-linear interpolation scheme. We validate our finding by computing the PSNR of the difference between multi-rotated images and their original version.

Complex wavelet transforms offer the opportunity to perform directional and coherent processing based on the local magnitude and phase of signals and images. Although denoising, segmentation, and image enhancement are significantly improved using complex wavelets, the redundancy of most current transforms hinders their application in compression and related problems. In this paper we introduce a new orthonormal complex wavelet transform with no redundancy for both real- and complex-valued signals. The transform's filter bank features a real low pass filter and two complex high pass filters arranged in a critically sampled three-band structure. Placing symmetry and orthogonality constraints on these filters, we find that each high-pass filter can be factored into a real high pass filter followed by an approximate Hilbert transform filter.

Hex-splines are a novel family of bivariate splines which are well suited to handle hexagonally sampled data. Similar to classical 1D B-splines, the spline coefficients need to be computed by a prefilter. Unfortunately, the elegant implementation of this prefilter by causal and anti-causal recursive filtering is not applicable for the (non-separable) hex-splines. Therefore, in this paper we introduce a novel approach from the viewpoint of approximation theory. We propose three different recursive filters and optimize their parameters such that a desired order of approximation is obtained. The results for third and fourth order hex-splines are discussed. Although the proposed solutions provide only quasi-interpolation, they tend to be very close to the interpolation prefilter.

This paper deals with fast image and video segmentation using active contours. Region based active contours using level-sets are powerful techniques for video segmentation hut they suffer from large computational cost. A parametric active contour method based on B-Spline interpolation has been proposed in F. Precioso (2002) to highly reduce the computational cost but this method is sensitive to noise. Here, we choose to relax the rigid interpolation constraint in order to robustify our method in the presence of noise: by using smoothing splines, we trade a tunable amount of interpolation error for a smoother spline curve. We show by experiments on natural sequences that this new flexibility yields segmentation results of higher quality at no additional computational cost. Hence real time processing for moving objects segmentation is preserved.

Every now and then, a new design of an interpolation kernel appears in the literature. While interesting results have emerged, the traditional design methodology proves laborious and is riddled with very large systems of linear equations that must be solved analytically. We propose to ease this burden by providing an explicit formula that can generate every possible piecewise-polynomial kernel given its degree, its support, its regularity, and its order of approximation. This formula contains a set of coefficients that can be chosen freely and do not interfere with the four main design parameters; it is thus easy to tune the design to achieve any additional constraints that the designer may care for.

We propose a construction of new wavelet-like bases that are well suited for the reconstruction and processing of optically generated Fresnel holograms recorded on CCD-arrays. The starting point is a wavelet basis of L2 to which we apply a unitary Fresnel transform. The transformed basis functions are shift-invariant on a level-by-level basis but their multiresolution properties are governed by the special form that the dilation operator takes in the Fresnel domain. We derive a Heisenberg-like uncertainty relation that relates the localization of Fresnelets with that of their associated wavelet basis. According to this criterion, the optimal functions for digital hologram processing turn out to be Gabor functions, bringing together two separate aspects of the holography inventor's work. We give the explicit expression of orthogonal and semi-orthogonal Fresnelet bases corresponding to polynomial spline wavelets. This special choice of Fresnelets is motivated by their near-optimal localization properties and their approximation characteristics. We then present an efficient multiresolution Fresnel transform algorithm, the Fresnelet transform. This algorithm allows for the reconstruction (backpropagation) of complex scalar waves at several user-defined, wavelength-independent resolutions. Furthermore, when reconstructing numerical holograms, the subband decomposition of the Fresnelet transform naturally separates the image to reconstruct from the unwanted zero-order and twin image terms. This greatly facilitates their suppression. We show results of experiments carried out on both synthetic (simulated) data sets as well as on digitally acquired holograms.

The LeGall 5/3 and Daubechies 9/7 filters have risen to special prominence because they were selected for inclusion in the JPEG2000 standard. We determine their key mathematical features: Riesz bounds, order of approximation, and regularity (Hölder and Sobolev). We give approximation theoretic quantities such as the asymptotic constant for the L2 error and the angle between the analysis and synthesis spaces which characterizes the loss of performance with respect to an orthogonal projection. We also derive new asymptotic error formulae that exhibit bound constants that are proportional to the magnitude of the first nonvanishing moment of the wavelet. The Daubechies 9/7 stands out because it is very close to orthonormal, but this turns out to be slightly detrimental to its asymptotic performance when compared to other wavelets with four vanishing moments.

We present a simple, original method to improve piecewise linear interpolation with uniform knots. We shift the sampling knots by a fixed amount, while enforcing the interpolation property. Thanks to a theoretical analysis, we determine the optimal shift that maximizes the quality of our shifted linear interpolation. Surprisingly enough, this optimal value is nonzero and it is close to 1/5. We confirm our theoretical findings by performing a cumulative rotation experiment, which shows a significant increase of the quality of the shifted method with respect to the standard one. Most interesting is the fact that we get a quality similar to that of high-quality cubic convolution at the computational cost of linear interpolation.

We propose to design the reduction operator of an image pyramid so as to minimize the approximation error in the l(p)-sense (not restricted to the usual p=2), where p can take noninteger values. The underlying image model is specified using shift-invariant basis functions, such as B-splines. The solution is well-defined and determined by an iterative optimization algorithm based on digital filtering. Its convergence is accelerated by the use of first and second order derivatives. For p close to 1, we show that the ringing is reduced and that the histogram of the detail image is sparse as compared with the standard case, where p=2.

We consider the problem of sampling signals which are not bandlimited, but still have a finite number of degrees of freedom per unit of time, such as, for example, piecewise polynomials. We demonstrate that by using an adequate sampling kernel and a sampling rate greater or equal to the number of degrees of freedom per unit of time, one can uniquely reconstruct such signals. This proves a sampling theorem for a wide class of signals beyond bandlimited signals. Applications of this sampling theorem can be found in signal processing, communication systems and biological systems. 1.

We present a method for the exact computation of the moments of a region bounded by a curve represented by a scaling function or wavelet basis. Using Green's theorem, we show that the computation of the area moments is equivalent to applying a suitable multidimensional filter on the coefficients of the curve and thereafter computing a scalar product. The multidimensional filter coefficients are precomputed exactly as the solution of a two-scale relation. To demonstrate the performance improvement of the new method, we compare it with existing methods such as pixel-based approaches and approximation of the region by a polygon. We also propose an alternate scheme when the scaling function is sinc(x).

We consider the problem of interpolating a signal using a linear combination of shifted versions of a compactly-supported basis function phi(x). We first give the expression for the cases of phi's that have minimal support for a given accuracy (also known as "approximation order"). This class of functions, which we call maximal-order-minimal-support functions (MOMS) is made of linear combinations of the B-spline of the same order and of its derivatives. We provide an explicit form of the MOMS that maximizes the approximation accuracy when the step-size is small enough. We compute the sampling gain obtained by using these optimal basis functions over the splines of the same order. We show that it is already substantial for small orders and that it further increases with the approximation order L. When L is large, this sampling gain becomes linear; more specifically, its exact asymptotic expression is 2/(pie)L. Since the optimal functions are continuous, but not differentiable, for even orders, and even only piecewise continuous for odd orders, our result implies that regularity has little to do with approximating performance. These theoretical findings are corroborated by experimental evidence that involves compounded rotations of images.

We present an optimal spline-based algorithm for the enlargement or reduction of digital images with arbitrary (noninteger) scaling factors. This projection-based approach can be realized thanks to a new finite difference method that allows the computation of inner products with analysis functions that are B-splines of any degree n. A noteworthy property of the algorithm is that the computational complexity per pixel does not depend on the scaling factor a. For a given choice of basis functions, the results of our method are consistently better than those of the standard interpolation procedure; the present scheme achieves a reduction of artifacts such as aliasing and blocking and a significant improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio. The method can be generalized to include other classes of piecewise polynomial functions, expressed as linear combinations of B-splines and their derivatives.

We define a new wavelet transform that is based on a previously defined family of scaling functions: the fractional B-splines. The interest of this family is that they interpolate between the integer degrees of polynomial B-splines and that they allow a fractional order of approximation. The orthogonal fractional spline wavelets essentially behave as fractional differentiators. This property seems promising for the analysis of 1/f/sup /spl alpha// noise that can be whitened by an appropriate choice of the degree of the spline transform. We present a practical FFT-based algorithm for the implementation of these fractional wavelet transforms, and give some examples of processing.

We present an explicit formula for spline kernels; these are defined as the convolution of several B-splines of variable widths h/sub i/ and degrees n/sub i/. The spline kernels are useful for continuous signal processing algorithms that involve B-spline inner-products or the convolution of several spline basis functions. We apply our results to the derivation of spline-based algorithms for two classes of problems. The first is the resizing of images with arbitrary scaling factors. The second is the computation of the Radon transform and of its inverse. In particular, we present a new spline-based version of the filtered back-projection algorithm for tomographic reconstruction. In both cases, our explicit kernel formula allows for the use of high-degree splines; these offer better approximation performance than the conventional lower-order formulations (e.g., piecewise constant or piece-wise linear models).

The most essential ingredient of interpolation is its basis function. We have shown in previous papers that this basis need not be necessarily interpolating to achieve good results. On the contrary, several studies have confirmed that non-interpolating bases, such as B-splines and O-moms, perform best. This opens up a much wider choice of basis functions. We give to the designer the tools that will allow him to characterize this enlarged space of functions. In particular, he will be able to specify up-front the four most important parameters for image processing: degree, support, regularity, and order. The theorems presented then allow him to refine his design by dealing with additional coefficients that can be selected freely, without interfering with the main design parameters.

We present an exact algorithm for the computation of the moments of a region bounded by a curve represented in a scaling function or wavelet basis. Using Green's theorem, we show that the computation of the area moments is equivalent to applying a suitable multidimensional filter on the coefficients of the curve and thereafter computing a scalar product. We compare this algorithm with existing methods such as pixel-based approached and approximation of the region by a polygon.

Based on the theory of approximation, this paper presents a unified analysis of interpolation and resampling techniques. An important issue is the choice of adequate basis functions. We show that, contrary to the common belief, those that perform best are not interpolating. By opposition to traditional interpolation, we call their use generalized interpolation; they involve a prefiltering step when correctly applied. We explain why the approximation order inherent in any basis function is important to limit interpolation artifacts. The decomposition theorem states that any basis function endowed with approximation order can be expressed as the convolution of a B-spline of the same order with another function that has none. This motivates the use of splines and spline-based functions as a tunable way to keep artifacts in check without any significant cost penalty. We discuss implementation and performance issues, and we provide experimental evidence to support our claims.

We extend the classical interpolation method to generalized interpolation. This extension is done by replacing the interpolating function by a non-interpolating function that is applied to prefiltered data, in order to preserve the interpolation condition. We show, both theoretically and practically, that this approach performs much better than classical methods, for the same computational cost.

We present an optimal spline-based algorithm for the enlargement or reduction of digital images with arbitrary scaling factors. This projection-based approach is realizable thanks to a new finite difference method that allows the computation of inner products with analysis functions that are B-splines of any degree n. For a given choice of basis functions, the results of our method are consistently better that those of the standard interpolation procedure; the present scheme achieves a reduction of artifacts such as aliasing and blocking and a significant improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio.

Our goal in this paper is to set a theoretical basis for the comparison of re-sampling and interpolation methods. We consider the general problem of the approximation of an arbitrary continuously-defined function f(x)-not necessarily bandlimited-when we vary the sampling step T. We present an accurate L/sup 2/ computation of the induced approximation error as a function of T for a general class of linear approximation operators including interpolation and other kinds of projectors. This new quantitative result provides exact expressions for the asymptotic development of the error as T/spl rarr/0, and also sharp (asymptotically exact) upper bounds.