Edge-preserving Filter Research Articles

An adaptive noise attenuation method for edge and amplitude preservation

Noise intensity distributed in seismic data varies with different frequencies or frequency bands; thus, noise attenuation on the full-frequency band affects the dynamic properties of the seismic reflection signal and the subsequent seismic data interpretation, reservoir description, hydrocarbon detection, etc. Hence, we propose an adaptive noise attenuation method for edge and amplitude preservation, wherein the wavelet packet transform is used to decompose the full-band seismic signal into multiband data and then process these data using nonlinear anisotropic dip-oriented edge-preserving filtering. In the filtering, the calculated diffusion tensor from the structure tensor can be exploited to establish the direction of smoothing. In addition, the fault confidence measure and discontinuity operator can be used to preserve the structural and stratigraphic discontinuities and edges, and the decorrelation criteria can be used to establish the number of iterations. These parameters can minimize the intervention and subjectivity of the interpreter, and simplify the application of the proposed method. We applied the proposed method to synthetic and real 3D marine seismic data. We found that the proposed method could be used to attenuate noise in seismic data while preserving the effective discontinuity information and amplitude characteristics in seismic reflection waves, providing high-quality data for interpretation and analysis such as high-resolution processing, attribute analysis, and inversion.

Improved multi-scale wavelet in pantograph slide edge detection

The mainstream methods of pantograph slide edge detection are based on canny operator and multi-scale wavelet. The former has good single edge response but the edge is fractured, the latter performs good edge continuity but contains excessive edge points. This paper combines the advantages of both methods and proposes as an improved multi-scale wavelet edge detection method based on canny criteria. Firstly we filtered the pantograph image with edge-preserving symmetric near neighbor filter. Secondly calculated the Gaussian wavelet modulus and arguments at all levels of scale, then suppressed the non-maxima value of modulus along the corresponding arguments. At last, we integrated the modulus drawings at all levels of scale, and connected edge with applicable dual-threshold. Experiments results show that the improved algorithm has both satisfactory performances in single edge response and edge continuity, it markedly improves the efficiency of edge detection algorithm. Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) analysis finds that the improved algorithm exceeds canny operator and traditional multi-scale wavelet edge detection. Moreover, it has higher positioning accuracy, clearer details and better noise performance.

Automated body-lung-air material map segmentation from pre-clinical MRI images for PET attenuation correction in Tera-Tomo 3D PET reconstruction engine of nanoScan PET/MRI system.

The aim of current work was to automatically derive a body-lung-air three-valued material map from MRI images for pre-clinical PET attenuation correction. Our goal was also to measure the effect of attenuation on corresponding pre-clinical PET images. 12 mouse and 9 rat PET/MRI images were acquired by nanoScan PET/MRI (Mediso). Each MRI image was filtered with edge-preserving Non-Local Means filter. Two segmentation stages were determined: the first stage separated the body and the air. The gravitational center of each disjunctive region determined by histogram-derived value ranges of the body and the air were inputs of two independent fuzzy-based affinity map generation steps. The fuzzy maps were merged with simple maximum into an initial binary body-air material map. In the second stage the gravitational center of disjunctive air regions laid inside the body mask were the seed points of the third fuzzy affinity map generation. Three fuzzy maps were merged with maximum operation into a three-valued mask. The three-valued material map was given as input for the Tera-Tomo 3D PET reconstruction engine to serve as the base for attenuation correction. Mouse and rat material map segmentation result were validated by two experienced pre-clinical researchers who manually drawn the ideal mask boundaries. The ratio of voxel misclassification was measured as 2.23% (mouse) and 1.87% (rat). Quantitative ROI measurements shown 1.3 - 2.7% AC and NAC PET differences. An automated and robust segmentation method was designed to provide a material map for pre-clinical PET attenuation correction. Although current work operated with PET/MRI images, the same method can be applied for nanoScan SPECT/MRI acquisitions. Results show that on the level of real quantitative measurements, attenuation correction of PET makes sense. As the next step of our future work we will investigate the effects of AC on pre-clinical nanoScan SPECT/MRI images.

A sparsity-ranking edge-preservation filter for removal of high-density impulse noises

In this study, a novel sparsity-ranking edge-preservation filter (SREPF) is proposed for removal of high-density impulse noise in images. Using the sparse matrix representation, the first stage of SREPF is not only to identify the noisy candidates but also to decide the processing order of them via a rank of noise-pixel sparsity in the working window. Then the second stage of SREPF utilizes a modified double Laplacian convolution to confirm the truly noisy pixels and yield a directional mean to recover them. This new approach has achieved more remarkable success rate of the edge detection than other edge-preservation methods especially in high noise ratio over 0.5. As a result, SREPF has significant improvements in terms of edge preservation and noise suppression exhibited by the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the structural similarity index metric (SSIM). Simulation results show that this method is capable of producing better performance compared to several representative filters.

Scanned image descreening with image redundancy and adaptive filtering.

Currently, most electrophotographic printers use halftoning technique to print continuous tone images, so scanned images obtained from such hard copies are usually corrupted by screen like artifacts. In this paper, a new model of scanned halftone image is proposed to consider both printing distortions and halftone patterns. Based on this model, an adaptive filtering based descreening method is proposed to recover high quality contone images from the scanned images. Image redundancy based denoising algorithm is first adopted to reduce printing noise and attenuate distortions. Then, screen frequency of the scanned image and local gradient features are used for adaptive filtering. Basic contone estimate is obtained by filtering the denoised scanned image with an anisotropic Gaussian kernel, whose parameters are automatically adjusted with the screen frequency and local gradient information. Finally, an edge-preserving filter is used to further enhance the sharpness of edges to recover a high quality contone image. Experiments on real scanned images demonstrate that the proposed method can recover high quality contone images from the scanned images. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method produces very sharp edges and much cleaner smooth regions.

SU‐C‐18A‐07: The Importance of Image Processing for Simulated Deformations

Purpose:Deformations can be digitally applied to patient images to evaluate the accuracy of deformable image registration (DIR). However, this can also deform image noise and artifacts, leaving a fingerprint of the underlying deformation that could skew accuracy determination. Image processing can be used to erase this fingerprint and create a more realistic DIR test scenario. The importance of image processing to simulated deformations is tested here.Methods:These tests utilize a virtual pelvic phantom, made from a patient CT image, and a pelvic‐shaped water phantom to acquire noise signatures. Two image‐filtering techniques are tested here: a spatial convolution with a Gaussian (SCG) and an edgepreserving filter (EPF) that preferentially removes the Fourier components associated with noise. Four different processing scenarios are evaluated here. The first is no processing (NP). For the second, noise from the water phantom is added to the set of test images without filtering (NF). The third and fourth scenarios add noise after applying the SCG and EPF filtering methods. EPF provides the most realistic test scenario. These processing scenarios are tested for their effect on the spatial accuracy of the DIR algorithms from MIM Software and Velocity Medical Solution.Results:For NP, NF, SCG, and EPF, the mean errors from MIM were 0.78, 1.11, 1.44, and 1.24 mm, respectively. The corresponding maximum errors for MIM were 21.7, 18.8, 26.1, and 21.1 mm, respectively. Velocity was relatively insensitive to these different processing scenarios, where the mean errors ranged from 1.66 to 1.74 mm and the maximum errors from 12.1 to 12.4 mm.Conclusion:Velocity creates globally smooth deformations, whereas MIM exhibits much more local pliability. This local pliability makes MIM sensitive to differences in image processing. Thus, an objective evaluation of its accuracy with simulated deformations must utilize realistic noise scenarios, with carefully balanced image processing.

Spectral–Spatial Hyperspectral Image Classification With Edge-Preserving Filtering

The integration of spatial context in the classification of hyperspectral images is known to be an effective way in improving classification accuracy. In this paper, a novel spectral-spatial classification framework based on edge-preserving filtering is proposed. The proposed framework consists of the following three steps. First, the hyperspectral image is classified using a pixelwise classifier, e.g., the support vector machine classifier. Then, the resulting classification map is represented as multiple probability maps, and edge-preserving filtering is conducted on each probability map, with the first principal component or the first three principal components of the hyperspectral image serving as the gray or color guidance image. Finally, according to the filtered probability maps, the class of each pixel is selected based on the maximum probability. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed edge-preserving filtering based classification method can improve the classification accuracy significantly in a very short time. Thus, it can be easily applied in real applications.

Hardware-Efficient Bilateral Filtering for Stereo Matching.

This paper presents a new bilateral filtering method specially designed for practical stereo vision systems. Parallel algorithms are preferred in these systems due to the real-time performance requirement. Edge-preserving filters like the bilateral filter have been demonstrated to be very effective for high-quality local stereo matching. A hardware-efficient bilateral filter is thus proposed in this paper. When moved to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 GPU, it can process a one megapixel color image at around 417 frames per second. This filter can be directly used for cost aggregation required in any local stereo matching algorithm. Quantitative evaluation shows that it outperforms all the other local stereo methods both in terms of accuracy and speed on Middlebury benchmark. It ranks 12th out of over 120 methods on Middlebury data sets, and the average runtime (including the matching cost computation, occlusion handling, and post processing) is only 15 milliseconds (67 frames per second).

A weighted least squares algorithm for time-of-flight depth image denoising

In this paper, we present a new denoising method for the depth image of a time-of-flight (ToF) camera, based on weighted least squares (WLS) framework. The common method for ToF depth image denoising is to use bilateral filter. However, the ability of bilateral filter in edge preservation would be reduced while we attempt to smooth out larger spatial scale noise. In order to avoid this problem and preserve the edge information as much as possible, we introduce a new way to construct edge-preserving ToF depth image denoising based on WLS. We are to our knowledge the first to present a WLS-based method for ToF depth image denoising. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with bilateral filter, our proposed algorithm not only achieves better performance in edge preservation, but also improves the PSNR values of the denoised images by 0.5–2.6dB.

Weighted Least Squares Based Detail Enhanced Exposure Fusion

Many recent computational photography techniques play a significant role to avoid limitation of standard digital cameras to handle wide dynamic range of the real-world scenes, containing brightly and poorly illuminated areas. In many of these techniques, it is often desirable to fuse details from images captured at different exposure settings, while avoiding visual artifacts. In this paper we propose a novel technique for exposure fusion in which Weighted Least Squares (WLS) optimization framework is utilized for weight map refinement. Computationally simple texture features (i.e., detail layer extracted with the help of edge preserving filter) and color saturation measure are preferred for quickly generating weight maps to control the contribution from an input set of multiexposure images. Instead of employing intermediate High Dynamic Range (HDR) reconstruction and tone mapping steps, well-exposed fused image is generated for displaying on conventional display devices. A further advantage of the present technique is that it is well suited for multifocus image fusion. Simulation results are compared with a number of existing single resolution and multiresolution techniques to show the benefits of the proposed scheme for variety of cases.

Tree Filtering: Efficient Structure-Preserving Smoothing With a Minimum Spanning Tree.

We present a new efficient edge-preserving filter-"tree filter"-to achieve strong image smoothing. The proposed filter can smooth out high-contrast details while preserving major edges, which is not achievable for bilateral-filter-like techniques. Tree filter is a weighted-average filter, whose kernel is derived by viewing pixel affinity in a probabilistic framework simultaneously considering pixel spatial distance, color/intensity difference, as well as connectedness. Pixel connectedness is acquired by treating pixels as nodes in a minimum spanning tree (MST) extracted from the image. The fact that an MST makes all image pixels connected through the tree endues the filter with the power to smooth out high-contrast, fine-scale details while preserving major image structures, since pixels in small isolated region will be closely connected to surrounding majority pixels through the tree, while pixels inside large homogeneous region will be automatically dragged away from pixels outside the region. The tree filter can be separated into two other filters, both of which turn out to have fast algorithms. We also propose an efficient linear time MST extraction algorithm to further improve the whole filtering speed. The algorithms give tree filter a great advantage in low computational complexity (linear to number of image pixels) and fast speed: it can process a 1-megapixel 8-bit image at ~ 0.25 s on an Intel 3.4 GHz Core i7 CPU (including the construction of MST). The proposed tree filter is demonstrated on a variety of applications.

Fast solver for some computational imaging problems: A regularized weighted least-squares approach

In this paper we propose to solve a range of computational imaging problems under a unified perspective of a regularized weighted least-squares (RWLS) framework. These problems include data smoothing and completion, edge-preserving filtering, gradient-vector flow estimation, and image registration. Although originally very different, they are special cases of the RWLS model using different data weightings and regularization penalties. Numerically, we propose a preconditioned conjugate gradient scheme which is particularly efficient in solving RWLS problems. We provide a detailed analysis of the system conditioning justifying our choice of the preconditioner that improves the convergence. This numerical solver, which is simple, scalable and parallelizable, is found to outperform most of the existing schemes for these imaging problems in terms of convergence rate.

Extrema-based Anisotropic Diffusion for Multi-scale Edge-preserving Image Decomposition

We present a new algorithm for decomposing an image based on the modified anisotropic diffusion equation. Inspired by edge-preserving-smoothing technique and the relationship between bilateral filtering and the nonlinear diffusion equation, we use the local extrema and gradient of the input image to extract information detailly. Basing on the key assumption that the spatial detail are characterized by the density of local extrema and the norm of gradient, we develop a method for decomposing images into base layer which records the salient edge of the image, and detail layer which records the fine scale texture. The experimental results demonstrate the effective of the proposed filter in application of the high-dynamic-range images display when compared with existing edge-preserving filter algorithms.

眼底图像中视盘的平滑滤波与CV模型分割

Reliable and efficient OD(optic disk)segmentation is significant to automatic retinal image diagnosis.A fast automatic OD segmentation algorithm is presented.First OD locations are identified by projection technology.Then,the main blood vessels around the OD vicinity are removed by Gabor filtering.And the vessel pixels are filled by interpolation arithmetic with neighborhood information,moreover a edge preservation filter is adopted to smooth OD region.Finally the OD boundary is detected by using CV model and leve sets algorithm.The algorithm is tested on MESSIDOR databases.The average segmentation accuracies are 0.83.The proposed method shows a good performance.

Optimization of Bilateral Filter Parameters via Chi-Square Unbiased Risk Estimate

Bilateral filter is an edge-preserving diffusion filter and is widely used for image denoising. The denoising quality is sensitive to the choice of the bilateral filter parameters. Here, we propose to use the Chi-Square Unbiased Risk Estimate (CURE) for optimizing bilateral filter parameters in squared magnitude MR images, which follow a non-central chi-square distribution with two degrees of freedom. CURE is an unbiased estimate of the Mean Squared Error (MSE) and it does not require any knowledge of the noise-free data. We derive explicit analytical expressions for CURE in the setting of bilateral filters and present experimental results that confirm the optimality of CURE.

An Efficient and Scalable Image Filtering Framework Using VIPS Fusion

Edge-preserving image filtering is a valuable tool for a variety of applications in image processing and computer vision. Motivated by a new simple but effective local Laplacian filter, we propose a scalable and efficient image filtering framework to extend this edge-preserving image filter and construct an uniform implementation in O (N) time. The proposed framework is built upon a practical global-to-local strategy. The input image is first remapped globally by a series of tentative remapping functions to generate a virtual candidate image sequence (Virtual Image Pyramid Sequence, VIPS). This sequence is then recombined locally to a single output image by a flexible edge-aware pixel-level fusion rule. To avoid halo artifacts, both the output image and the virtual candidate image sequence are transformed into multi-resolution pyramid representations. Four examples, single image dehazing, multi-exposure fusion, fast edge-preserving filtering and tone-mapping, are presented as the concrete applications of the proposed framework. Experiments on filtering effect and computational efficiency indicate that the proposed framework is able to build a wide range of fast image filtering that yields visually compelling results.

Hardware Implementation of a Fast and Efficient Haze Removal Method

In this letter, a fast and efficient haze removal method is presented. We employ an extremum approximate method to extract the atmospheric light and propose a contour preserving estimation to obtain the transmission by using edge-preserving and mean filters alternately. Our method can efficiently avoid the halo artifact generated in the recovered image. To meet the requirement of real-time applications, an 11-stage pipelined hardware architecture for our haze removal method is presented. It can achieve 200 MHz with 12.8 K gate counts by using TSMC 0.13- μm technology. Simulation results indicate that our design can obtain comparable results with the least execution time compared to previous algorithms and is suitable for low-cost high-performance hardware implementation for haze removal.

Metal artifact reduction in CT using fusion based prior image

In computed tomography, metallic objects in the scanning field create the so-called metal artifacts in the reconstructed images. Interpolation-based methods for metal artifact reduction (MAR) replace the metal-corrupted projection data with surrogate data obtained from interpolation using the surrounding uncorrupted sinogram information. Prior-based MAR methods further improve interpolation-based methods by better estimating the surrogate data using forward projections from a prior image. However, the prior images in most existing prior-based methods are obtained from segmented images and misclassification in segmentation often leads to residual artifacts and tissue structure loss in the final corrected images. To overcome these drawbacks, the authors propose a fusion scheme, named fusion prior-based MAR (FP-MAR). The FP-MAR method consists of (i) precorrect the image by means of an interpolation-based MAR method and an edge-preserving blur filter; (ii) generate a prior image from the fusion of this precorrected image and the originally reconstructed image with metal parts removed; (iii) forward project this prior image to guide the estimation of the surrogate data using well-developed replacement techniques. Both simulations and clinical image tests are carried out to show that the proposed FP-MAR method can effectively reduce metal artifacts. A comparison with other MAR methods demonstrates that the FP-MAR method performs better in artifact suppression and tissue feature preservation. From a wide range of clinical cases to which FP-MAR has been tested (single or multiple pieces of metal, various shapes, and sizes), it can be concluded that the proposed fusion based prior image preserves more tissue information than other segmentation-based prior approaches and can provide better estimates of the surrogate data in prior-based MAR methods.

선형 MSR을 이용한 역광 영상의 명암비 향상 알고리즘

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to improve the contrast ratio, to preserve information of bright regions and to maintain the color of backlight image that appears with a great relative contrast. Backlight images of the natural environment have characteristics for difference of local brightness; the overall image contrast improvement is not easy. To improve the contrast of the backlight images, MSR (Multi-Scale Retinex) algorithm using the existing multi-scale Gaussian filter is applied. However, existing multi-scale Gaussian filter involves color distortion and information loss of bright regions due to excessive contrast enhancement and noise because of the brightness improvement of dark regions. Moreover, it also increases computational complexity due to the use of multi-scale Gaussian filter. In order to solve these problems, a linear MSR is performed that reduces the amount of computation from the HSV color space preventing the color distortion and information loss due to excessive contrast enhancement. It can also remove the noise of the dark regions which is occurred due to the improved contrast through edge preserving filter. Through experimental evaluation of the average color difference comparison of CIELAB color space and the visual assessment, we have confirmed excellent performance of the proposed algorithm compared to conventional MSR algorithm.

Guided Image Filtering

In this paper, we propose a novel explicit image filter called guided filter. Derived from a local linear model, the guided filter computes the filtering output by considering the content of a guidance image, which can be the input image itself or another different image. The guided filter can be used as an edge-preserving smoothing operator like the popular bilateral filter [1], but it has better behaviors near edges. The guided filter is also a more generic concept beyond smoothing: It can transfer the structures of the guidance image to the filtering output, enabling new filtering applications like dehazing and guided feathering. Moreover, the guided filter naturally has a fast and nonapproximate linear time algorithm, regardless of the kernel size and the intensity range. Currently, it is one of the fastest edge-preserving filters. Experiments show that the guided filter is both effective and efficient in a great variety of computer vision and computer graphics applications, including edge-aware smoothing, detail enhancement, HDR compression, image matting/feathering, dehazing, joint upsampling, etc.