Robust Image Alignment Research Articles

Online Subspace Learning from Gradient Orientations for Robust Image Alignment.

Robust and efficient image alignment remains a challenging task, due to the massiveness of images, great illumination variations between images, partial occlusion, and corruption. To address these challenges, we propose an online image alignment method via subspace learning from image gradient orientations (IGOs). The proposed method integrates the subspace learning, transformed the IGO reconstruction and image alignment into a unified online framework, which is robust for aligning images with severe intensity distortions. Our method is motivated by a principal component analysis (PCA) from gradient orientations that provides more reliable low-dimensional subspace than that from pixel intensities. Instead of processing in the intensity-domain-like conventional methods, we seek alignment in the IGO domain, such that the aligned IGO of the newly arrived image can be decomposed as the sum of a sparse error and a linear composition of the IGO-PCA basis learned from previously well-aligned ones. The optimization problem is tackled by an iterative linearization that minimizes the l1 -norm of the sparse error. Furthermore, the IGO-PCA basis is adaptively updated based on incremental thin singular value decomposition, which takes the shift of IGO mean into consideration. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated on the extensive challenging datasets through image alignment, medical atlas construction, and face recognition. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm provides more illumination- and occlusion-robust image alignment than the state-of-the-art methods.

Image Alignment-Based Multi-Region Matching for Object-Level Tampering Detection

Tampering detection methods based on image hashing have been widely studied with continuous advancements. However, most existing models cannot generate object-level tampering localization results, because the forensic hashes attached to the image lack contour information. In this paper, we present a novel tampering detection model that can generate an accurate, object-level tampering localization result. First, an adaptive image segmentation method is proposed to segment the image into closed regions based on strong edges. Then, the color and position features of the closed regions are extracted as a forensic hash. Furthermore, a geometric invariant tampering localization model named image alignment-based multi-region matching (IAMRM) is proposed to establish the region correspondence between the received and forensic images by exploiting their intrinsic structure information. The model estimates the parameters of geometric transformations via a robust image alignment method based on triangle similarity; in addition, it matches multiple regions simultaneously by utilizing manifold ranking based on different graph structures and features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed IAMRM is a promising method for object-level tampering detection compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Iterative Grassmannian optimization for robust image alignment

Robust high-dimensional data processing has witnessed an exciting development in recent years. Theoretical results have shown that it is possible using convex programming to optimize data fit to a low-rank component plus a sparse outlier component. This problem is also known as robust PCA, and it has found application in many areas of computer vision. In image and video processing and face recognition, the opportunity to process massive image databases is emerging as people upload photo and video data online in unprecedented volumes. However, data quality and consistency is not controlled in any way, and the massiveness of the data poses a serious computational challenge. In this paper we present t-GRASTA, or “Transformed GRASTA (Grassmannian robust adaptive subspace tracking algorithm)”. t-GRASTA iteratively performs incremental gradient descent constrained to the Grassmann manifold of subspaces in order to simultaneously estimate three components of a decomposition of a collection of images: a low-rank subspace, a sparse part of occlusions and foreground objects, and a transformation such as rotation or translation of the image. We show that t-GRASTA is 4× faster than state-of-the-art algorithms, has half the memory requirement, and can achieve alignment for face images as well as jittered camera surveillance images.

Improved image alignment method in application to X-ray images and biological images

Alignment of medical images is a vital component of a large number of applications throughout the clinical track of events; not only within clinical diagnostic settings, but prominently so in the area of planning, consummation and evaluation of surgical and radiotherapeutical procedures. However, image registration of medical images is challenging because of variations on data appearance, imaging artifacts and complex data deformation problems. Hence, the aim of this study is to develop a robust image alignment method for medical images. An improved image registration method is proposed, and the method is evaluated with two types of medical data, including biological microscopic tissue images and dental X-ray images and compared with five state-of-the-art image registration techniques. The experimental results show that the presented method consistently performs well on both types of medical images, achieving 88.44 and 88.93% averaged registration accuracies for biological tissue images and X-ray images, respectively, and outperforms the benchmark methods. Based on the Tukey's honestly significant difference test and Fisher's least square difference test tests, the presented method performs significantly better than all existing methods (P ≤ 0.001) for tissue image alignment, and for the X-ray image registration, the proposed method performs significantly better than the two benchmark b-spline approaches (P < 0.001). The software implementation of the presented method and the data used in this study are made publicly available for scientific communities to use (http://www-o.ntust.edu.tw/∼cweiwang/ImprovedImageRegistration/). cweiwang@mail.ntust.edu.tw.

A Robust Image Alignment Algorithm for Video Stabilization Purposes

Today, many people in the world without any (or with little) knowledge about video recording, thanks to the widespread use of mobile devices (personal digital assistants, mobile phones, etc.), take videos. However, the unwanted movements of their hands typically blur and introduce disturbing jerkiness in the recorded sequences. Many video stabilization techniques have been hence developed with different performances but only fast strategies can be implemented on embedded devices. A fundamental issue is the overall robustness with respect to different scene contents (indoor, outdoor, etc.) and conditions (illumination changes, moving objects, etc.). In this paper, we propose a fast and robust image alignment algorithm for video stabilization purposes. Our contribution is twofold: a fast and accurate block-based local motion estimator together with a robust alignment algorithm based on voting. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of both local and global motion estimators.

Joint photometric and geometric image registration in the total least square sense

This paper presents a novel robust image alignment technique that performs joint geometric and photometric registration in the total least square (TLS) sense. Therefore, we employ the total least square metric instead of the ordinary least square (OLS) metric, which is commonly used in the literature. While the OLS model is sufficient to tackle geometric registration problems, it gives no mutually consistent estimates when dealing with photometric deformations. By introducing a new TLS model, we obtain mutually consistent parameters. Experimental results show that our method is indeed more consistent and accurate in presence of noise compared to existing joint registration algorithms.

Accurate and robust brain image alignment using boundary-based registration

The fine spatial scales of the structures in the human brain represent an enormous challenge to the successful integration of information from different images for both within- and between-subject analysis. While many algorithms to register image pairs from the same subject exist, visual inspection shows that their accuracy and robustness to be suspect, particularly when there are strong intensity gradients and/or only part of the brain is imaged. This paper introduces a new algorithm called Boundary-Based Registration, or BBR. The novelty of BBR is that it treats the two images very differently. The reference image must be of sufficient resolution and quality to extract surfaces that separate tissue types. The input image is then aligned to the reference by maximizing the intensity gradient across tissue boundaries. Several lower quality images can be aligned through their alignment with the reference. Visual inspection and fMRI results show that BBR is more accurate than correlation ratio or normalized mutual information and is considerably more robust to even strong intensity inhomogeneities. BBR also excels at aligning partial-brain images to whole-brain images, a domain in which existing registration algorithms frequently fail. Even in the limit of registering a single slice, we show the BBR results to be robust and accurate.

Supervised nonparametric image parcellation.

Segmentation of medical images is commonly formulated as a supervised learning problem, where manually labeled training data are summarized using a parametric atlas. Summarizing the data alleviates the computational burden at the expense of possibly losing valuable information on inter-subject variability. This paper presents a novel framework for Supervised Nonparametric Image Parcellation (SNIP). SNIP models the intensity and label images as samples of a joint distribution estimated from the training data in a non-parametric fashion. By capitalizing on recently developed fast and robust pairwise image alignment tools, SNIP employs the entire training data to segment a new image via Expectation Maximization. The use of multiple registrations increases robustness to occasional registration failures. We report experiments on 39 volumetric brain MRI scans with manual labels for the white matter, cortex and subcortical structures. SNIP yields better segmentation than state-of-the-art algorithms in multiple regions of interest.

Robust and Efficient Image Alignment Based on Relative Gradient Matching

In this paper, we present a robust image alignment algorithm based on matching of relative gradient maps. This algorithm consists of two stages; namely, a learning-based approximate pattern search and an iterative energy-minimization procedure for matching relative image gradient. The first stage finds some candidate poses of the pattern from the image through a fast nearest-neighbor search of the best match of the relative gradient features computed from training database of feature vectors, which are obtained from the synthesis of the geometrically transformed template image with the transformation parameters uniformly sampled from a given transformation parameter space. Subsequently, the candidate poses are further verified and refined by matching the relative gradient images through an iterative energy- minimization procedure. This approach based on the matching of relative gradients is robust against nonuniform illumination variations. Experimental results on both simulated and real images are shown to demonstrate superior efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm over the conventional normalized correlation method.