Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision

This paper presents a mutual-information based optimization algorithm for improving piecewise-linear (PWL) image registration. PWL-registration techniques, which are well-suited for registering images of the same scene with relative local distortions, divide the images in conjugate triangular patches that are individually mapped through affine transformations. For this process to be accurate, each pair of corresponding image triangles must be the projections of a planar surface in space; otherwise, the registration incurs in errors that appear in the resultant registered image as local distortions (distorted shapes, broken lines, etc.). Given an initial triangular mesh onto the images, we propose an optimization algorithm that, by swapping edges, modifies the mesh topology looking for an improvement in the registration. For detecting the edges to be swapped we employ a cost function based on the mutual information (MI), a metric for registration consistency more robust to image radiometric differences than other well-known metrics such as normalized cross correlation (NCC). The proposed method has been successfully tested with different sets of test images, both synthetic and real, acquired from different angles and lighting conditions.

Mathematical morphology is a framework composed by a set of well-known image processing techniques, widely used for binary and grayscale images, but less commonly used to process color or multivariate images. In this paper, we generalize fuzzy mathematical morphology to process multivariate images in such a way that overcomes the problem of defining an appropriate order among colors. We introduce the soft color erosion and the soft color dilation, which are the foundations of the rest of operators. Besides studying their theoretical properties, we analyze their behavior and compare them with the corresponding morphological operators from other frameworks that deal with color images. The soft color morphology outstands when handling images in the CIEL $${}^*a{}^*b{}^*$$ color space, where it guarantees that no colors with different chromatic values to the original ones are created. The soft color morphological operators prove to be easily customizable but also highly interpretable. Besides, they are fast operators and provide smooth outputs, more visually appealing than the crisp color transitions provided by other approaches.

The great flexibility of a view camera allows the acquisition of high quality images that would not be possible any other way. Bringing a given object into focus is however a long and tedious task, although the underlying optical laws are known. A fundamental parameter is the aperture of the lens entrance pupil because it directly affects the depth of field. The smaller the aperture, the larger the depth of field. However a too small aperture destroys the sharpness of the image because of diffraction on the pupil edges. Hence, the desired optimal configuration of the camera is such that the object is in focus with the greatest possible lens aperture. In this paper, we show that when the object is a convex polyhedron, an elegant solution to this problem can be found. It takes the form of a constrained optimization problem, for which theoretical and numerical results are given. The optimization algorithm has been implemented on the prototype of a robotised view camera.

Discrete tomography reconstructs an image of an object on a grid from its discrete projections along relatively few directions. When the resulting system of linear equations is under-determined, the reconstructed image is not unique. Ghosts are arrays of signed pixels that have zero sum projections along these directions; they define the image pixel locations that have non-unique solutions. In general, the discrete projection directions are chosen to define a ghost that has minimal impact on the reconstructed image. Here we construct binary boundary ghosts, which only affect a thin string of pixels distant from the object centre. This means that a large portion of the object around its centre can be uniquely reconstructed. We construct these boundary ghosts from maximal primitive ghosts, configurations of $$2^N$$ connected binary ( $$\pm 1$$ ) points over N directions. Maximal ghosts obfuscate image reconstruction and find application in secure storage of digital data.

In this paper we prove an equivalence relation between the distance transform of a binary image, where the underlying distance is based on a positive definite quadratic form, and the erosion of its characteristic function by an elliptic poweroid structuring element. The algorithms devised by Shih and Mitchell [18] and Huang and Mitchell [7], for calculating the exact Euclidean distance transform (EDT) of a binary digital image manifested on a square grid, are particular cases of this result. The former algorithm uses erosion by a circular cone to calculate the EDT whilst the latter uses erosion by an elliptic paraboloid (which allows for pixel aspect ratio correction) to calculate the square of the EDT. Huang and Mitchell's algorithm [7] is arguably the better of the two because: (i) the structuring element can be decomposed into a sequence of dilations by 3 × 3 structuring elements (a similar decomposition is not possible for the circular cone) thus reducing the complexity of the erosion, and (ii) the algorithm only requires integer arithmetic (it produces squared distance). The algorithm is amenable to both hardware implementation using a pipeline architecture and efficient implementation on serial machines. Unfortunately the algorithm does not directly transpose to, nor has a corresponding analogue on, the hexagonal grid (the same is also true for Shih and Mitchell's algorithm [7]). In this paper, however, we show that if the hexagonal grid image is embedded in a rectangular grid then Huang and Mitchell's algorithm [7] can be applied, with aspect ratio correction, to obtain the exact EDT on the hexagonal grid.

Techniques devoted to generating triangular meshes from intensity images either take as input a segmented image or generate a mesh without distinguishing individual structures contained in the image. These facts may cause difficulties in using such techniques in some applications, such as numerical simulations. In this work we reformulate a previously developed technique for mesh generation from intensity images called Imesh. This reformulation makes Imesh more versatile due to an unified framework that allows an easy change of refinement metric, rendering it effective for constructing meshes for applications with varied requirements, such as numerical simulation and image modeling. Furthermore, a deeper study about the point insertion problem and the development of geometrical criterion for segmentation is also reported in this paper. Meshes with theoretical guarantee of quality can also be obtained for each individual image structure as a post-processing step, a characteristic not usually found in other methods. The tests demonstrate the flexibility and the effectiveness of the approach.

Euler’s elastica-based unsupervised segmentation models have strong capability of completing the missing boundaries for existing objects in a clean image, but they are not working well for noisy images. This paper aims to establish a Euler’s elastica-based approach that can properly deal with the random noises to improve the segmentation performance for noisy images. The corresponding formulation of stochastic optimization is solved via the progressive hedging algorithm (PHA), and the description of each individual scenario is obtained by the alternating direction method of multipliers. Technically, all the sub-problems derived from the framework of PHA can be solved by using the curvature-weighted approach and the convex relaxation method. Then, an alternating optimization strategy is applied by using some powerful accelerating techniques including the fast Fourier transform and generalized soft threshold formulas. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both synthetic and real images, which displayed significant gains of the proposed segmentation models and demonstrated the advantages of the developed algorithms.

Anisotropic and high-order diffusion variational models have excellent performances in image coherence and smoothness preserving, respectively. In order to preserve these merits simultaneously in one variational model for image restoration, we propose three second-order anisotropic variational models making use of directional Hessian. The first one is the double-orientational bounded Hessian (DOBH) model; it is an extension to the isotropic bounded Hessian (BH) model. The second is the double-orientational total generalized variation (DOTGV), which is an extension to the total generalized variation (TGV) model. The third is the double-orientational total variation and bounded Hessian (DOTBH) model, which is a hybrid one combining the first-order and second-order directional regularizers. The second-order directional derivatives are designed by Hession and directional vectors which are derived from classic structure tensors. In order to cope with complex calculations of these models, alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithms are designed, respectively. Thus, the proposed models can be decomposed into a set of simple sub-problems of optimization, which can be solved by fast FFT method or soft thresholding formulas. In order to improve computational efficiency, fast ADMM algorithms with restart strategy are designed and implemented finally. Experimental results demonstrate better performances compared with previous classical models, especially in large-scale texture restoration.

It is known that for every selection of illumination spectra there is a coordinate system such that all coordinate vectors of these illumination spectra are located in a cone. A natural set of transformations of this cone are the Lorentz transformations. In this paper we investigate if sequences of illumination spectra can be described by one-parameter subgroups of Lorentz-transformations. We present two methods to estimate the parameters of such a curve from a set of coordinate points. We also use an optimization technique to approximate a given set of points by a one-parameter curve with a minimum approximation error. In the experimental part of the paper we investigate series of blackbody radiators and sequences of measured daylight spectra and show that one-parameter curves provide good approximations for large sequences of illumination spectra.