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Fast Bayesian blind deconvolution with Huber Super Gaussian priors

We report expectation Maximization (EM) based inference has already proven to be a very powerful tool to solve blind image deconvolution (BID) problems. Unfortunately, three important problems still impede the application of EM in BID: the undesirable saddle points and local minima caused by highly nonconvex priors, the instability around zero of some of the most interesting sparsity promoting priors, and the intrinsic high computational cost of the corresponding BID algorithm. In this paper we first show how Super Gaussian priors can be made numerically tractable around zero by introducing the family of Huber Super Gaussian priors and then present a fast EM based blind deconvolution method formulated in the image space. In the proposed computational approach, image and kernel estimation are performed by using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), which allows to exploit the advantages of FFT computation. For highly nonconvex priors, we propose a Smooth ADMM (SADMM) approach to avoid poor BID estimates. In conclusion, extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art BID methods in terms of quality of the reconstructions and speed.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Minimum entropy deconvolution and blind equalisation

Relationships between minimum entropy deconvolution, developed primarily for geophysics applications, and blind equalization are pointed out. It is seen that a large class of existing blind equalization algorithms are directly related to the scale-invariant cost functions used in minimum entropy deconvolution. Thus the extensive analyses of these cost functions can be directly applied to blind equalization, including the important asymptotic results of Donoho.

Satorius, E. H.↗

Variational Bayesian Blind Image Deconvolution: A review

In this study, we provide a review of the recent literature on Bayesian Blind Image Deconvolution (BID) methods. We believe that two events have marked the recent history of BID: the predominance of Variational Bayes (VB) inference as a tool to solve BID problems and the increasing interest of the computer vision community in solving BID problems. VB inference in combination with recent image models like the ones based on Super Gaussian (SG) and Scale Mixture of Gaussians (SMG) representations have led to the use of very general and powerful tools to provide clear images from blurry observations. In the provided review emphasis is paid on VB inference and the use of SG and SMG models with coverage of recent advances in sampling methods. We also provide examples of current state of the art BID methods and discuss problems that very likely will mark the near future of BID.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

TU-CD-BRA-12: Coupling PET Image Restoration and Segmentation Using Variational Method with Multiple Regularizations

Purpose: To propose a new variational method which couples image restoration with tumor segmentation for PET images using multiple regularizations. Methods: Partial volume effect (PVE) is a major degrading factor impacting tumor segmentation accuracy in PET imaging. The existing segmentation methods usually need to take prior calibrations to compensate PVE and they are highly system-dependent. Taking into account that image restoration and segmentation can promote each other and they are tightly coupled, we proposed a variational method to solve the two problems together. Our method integrated total variation (TV) semi-blind deconvolution and Mumford-Shah (MS) segmentation. The TV norm was used on edges to protect the edge information, and the L{sub 2} norm was used to avoid staircase effect in the no-edge area. The blur kernel was constrained to the Gaussian model parameterized by its variance and we assumed that the variances in the X-Y and Z directions are different. The energy functional was iteratively optimized by an alternate minimization algorithm. Segmentation performance was tested on eleven patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and evaluated by Dice similarity index (DSI) and classification error (CE). For comparison, seven other widely used methods were also tested and evaluated. Results: The combination of TV and L{sub 2} regularizations effectively improved the segmentation accuracy. The average DSI increased by around 0.1 than using either the TV or the L{sub 2} norm. The proposed method was obviously superior to other tested methods. It has an average DSI and CE of 0.80 and 0.41, while the FCM method — the second best one — has only an average DSI and CE of 0.66 and 0.64. Conclusion: Coupling image restoration and segmentation can handle PVE and thus improves tumor segmentation accuracy in PET. Alternate use of TV and L2 regularizations can further improve the performance of the algorithm. This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC), under Grant No.61375018, and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, under Grant No. 2012QN086. Wei Lu was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant No. R01 CA172638.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Super Resolving Unrolled Neural Networks for Remote Sensing

In remote sensing systems, the capabilities of the system are constrained by the complex interactions between size, weight, and power (SWAP) of potential designs. In electro-optical (EO) systems, examples of these critical parameters include the system’s sensitivity and resolution. Those parameters can be increased by ever larger optical apertures and focal planes but at the cost of more SWAP. Multi-image super resolution (MISR) techniques allow resolution to be enhanced via computation rather than more sophisticated optical hardware. These algorithms combine multiple images together into a single, higher resolution image, trading temporal resolution and computation for spatial resolution. Fielded MISR techniques, such as Drizzle, can require several hundred images to create a single super resolved image, implying reduced temporal resolution, increased data acquisition load, and limiting mission applications. Iterative techniques, such as model-based image reconstruction and compressive sensing, have been shown to create super resolved images using fewer images than Drizzle. They do this by posing an optimization problem that balances accuracy between a highly accurate physical model and an image model. In the case of super resolution, the physical model is defined by the relation between low resolution input images and the desired high resolution output image. The image model encodes some assumptions about the super resolved image. These assumptions are meant to suppress reconstruction artifacts that arise due to deterministic physical model error, stochastic measurement noise, and potential undersampling. In practice, the performance of iterative methods are limited by imaging models compatible with optimization. Deep learning-based methods can effectively learn image models of arbitrary complexity, but lack the theoretical explainability and robustness of iterative techniques. Consensus equilibrium (CE) generalizes the iterative techniques beyond optimization, enabling blackbox algorithms such as traditional and neural image denoisers to be used as the image model. CE-based approaches retain much of the explainability and robustness of iterative techniques while allowing the expressiveness of machine learning image models to be used. Additionally, by unrolling iterations of CE with an embedded image denoiser, the image denoiser can be further trained and specialized to the specific application with potentially higher quality reconstructions. Under this project, we demonstrated the feasibility of training an unrolled neural network based upon CE. While we didn’t train one, we showed that the CE process is differentiable and its gradient can be tractably computed. We also explored the usage of a variants of CE akin to generative neural works. Most importantly, we applied the CE framework to a number of problems including non-blind deconvolution, upsampling, single-image super resolution, MISR, event-based sensing, and saturated deconvolution. Our MISR prototype creates high quality reconstructions with an order of magnitude fewer images than previous approaches and, critically, produces these reconstructions fast enough for practical usage.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

The Second Flight of the Sunrise Balloon-borne Solar Observatory: Overview of Instrument Updates, the Flight, the Data, and First Results

The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory, consisting of a 1 m aperture telescope that provides a stabilized image to a UV filter imager and an imaging vector polarimeter, carried out its second science flight in 2013 June. It provided observations of parts of active regions at high spatial resolution, including the first high-resolution images in the Mg ii k line. The obtained data are of very high quality, with the best UV images reaching the diffraction limit of the telescope at 3000 Å after Multi-Frame Blind Deconvolution reconstruction accounting for phase-diversity information. Here a brief update is given of the instruments and the data reduction techniques, which includes an inversion of the polarimetric data. Mainly those aspects that evolved compared with the first flight are described. A tabular overview of the observations is given. In addition, an example time series of a part of the emerging active region NOAA AR 11768 observed relatively close to disk center is described and discussed in some detail. The observations cover the pores in the trailing polarity of the active region, as well as the polarity inversion line where flux emergence was ongoing and a small flare-like brightening occurred in the course of the time series. The pores are found to contain magnetic field strengths ranging up to 2500 G, and while large pores are clearly darker and cooler than the quiet Sun in all layers of the photosphere, the temperature and brightness of small pores approach or even exceed those of the quiet Sun in the upper photosphere.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Astronomical imaging by pupil plane interferometry

Comparing rotational shear interferometry to standard speckle interferometry, it is found that it is easier in the first case to separate the atmospheric phases from the object transform phases. Phase closure and blind deconvolution should be directly applicable. Laboratory simulations were conducted to verify theoretical predictions and computer simulations for the phase closure case, and preliminary results show promise.

Ribak, Erez↗

Iterative deconvolution of x ray and optical SNR images

Blind Iterative Deconvolution (BID) is a technique which was originally developed to correct the degrading effects of atmospheric turbulence on astronomical images from single short exposure, high signal-to-noise-ratio frames. At the Center for Astro physics, we have implemented a version of BID following the general approach of Ayers and Dainty (1988), but extending the technique to use Wiener filtering, and developed it for application to high energy images from Einstein and ROSAT. In the optical, the point spread function (PSF) that degrades the images is due to a combination of telescope and atmospheric aberrations. At high energies, the degrading function is the instrument response function, which is known to be time and energy level unstable. In both cases, the PSF is poorly known, so BID can be used to extract the PSF from the image and then deconvolve the blurred image to produce a sharpened image. Other aspects of this technique are discussed.

Nisenson, Peter↗

Variational Dirichlet Blur Kernel Estimation

Blind image deconvolution involves two key objectives: 1) latent image and 2) blur estimation. For latent image estimation, we propose a fast deconvolution algorithm, which uses an image prior of nondimensional Gaussianity measure to enforce sparsity and an undetermined boundary condition methodology to reduce boundary artifacts. For blur estimation, a linear inverse problem with normalization and nonnegative constraints must be solved. However, the normalization constraint is ignored in many blind image deblurring methods, mainly because it makes the problem less tractable. In this paper, we show that the normalization constraint can be very naturally incorporated into the estimation process by using a Dirichlet distribution to approximate the posterior distribution of the blur. Making use of variational Dirichlet approximation, we provide a blur posterior approximation that considers the uncertainty of the estimate and removes noise in the estimated kernel. Furthermore, experiments with synthetic and real data demonstrate that the proposed method is very competitive to the state-of-the-art blind image restoration methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scatter and Blur Corrections for High-Energy X-Ray Radiography

High-energy X-ray radiography is useful as a highly penetrating method for imaging through dense materials. However, the primary modes of interaction of X-rays at these energies involve scattering or the production of secondary high-energy photons, which can interfere with the image. In addition, detector blurring, often resulting from scatter within the detector, can reduce image sharpness. Both of these processes can be mitigated with the use of convolution kernels, with the main challenge being that the proper kernel to use is not known, particularly for the scatter contribution. By radiographing solid slabs of uniform attenuation, we show that point spread functions and material-specific point scatter functions can be determined to significantly reduce the effect of detector blurring and object scatter. Constraining the fits to the slabs and uniform transmission within the slabs is sufficient to recover these functions. A functional form that reproduces the angular distribution of high-energy bremsstrahlung X-rays is presented for recovering point scatter functions. In conclusion, the method is applied to radiographs of objects from bremsstrahlung X-ray sources operating at 4- and 7.5-MV endpoint energies and a significant increase in sharpness is observed.

Blind deconvolution↗

Recovering the fine structures in solar images

Several examples of the capability of the blind iterative deconvolution (BID) technique to recover the real point spread function, when limited a priori information is available about its characteristics. To demonstrate the potential of image post-processing for probing the fine scale and temporal variability of the solar atmosphere, the BID technique is applied to different samples of solar observations from space. The BID technique was originally proposed for correction of the effects of atmospheric turbulence on optical images. The processed images provide a detailed view of the spatial structure of the solar atmosphere at different heights in regions with different large-scale magnetic field structures.

Karovska, Margarita↗

High Resolution Imaging of the Sun with CORONAS-1

We applied several image restoration and enhancement techniques, to CORONAS-I images. We carried out the characterization of the Point Spread Function (PSF) using the unique capability of the Blind Iterative Deconvolution (BID) technique, which recovers the real PSF at a given location and time of observation, when limited a priori information is available on its characteristics. We also applied image enhancement technique to extract the small scale structure imbeded in bright large scale structures on the disk and on the limb. The results demonstrate the capability of the image post-processing to substantially increase the yield from the space observations by improving the resolution and reducing noise in the images.

Karovska, Margarita↗