A novel scheme for the detection of object boundaries is presented. The technique is based on active contours evolving in time according to intrinsic geometric measures of the image. The evolving contours naturally split and merge, allowing the simultaneous detection of several objects and both interior and exterior boundaries. The proposed approach is based on the relation between active contours and the computation of geodesics or minimal distance curves. The minimal distance curve lays in a Riemannian space whose metric is defined by the image content. This geodesic approach for object segmentation allows to connect classical "snakes" based on energy minimization and geometric active contours based on the theory of curve evolution. Previous models of geometric active contours are improved, allowing stable boundary detection when their gradients suffer from large variations, including gaps. Formal results concerning existence, uniqueness, stability, and correctness of the evolution are presented as well. The scheme was implemented using an efficient algorithm for curve evolution. Experimental results of applying the scheme to real images including objects with holes and medical data imagery demonstrate its power. The results may be extended to 3D object segmentation as well.

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A simplified color image formation model is used to construct an algorithm for image reconstruction from CCD sensors samples. The proposed method involves two successive steps. The first is motivated by Cok’s template matching technique, while the second step uses steerable inverse diffusion in color. Classical linear signal processing techniques tend to oversmooth the image and result in noticeable color artifacts along edges and sharp features. The question is how should the different color channels support each other to form the best possible reconstruction. Our answer is to let the edges support the color information, and the color channels support the edges, and thereby achieve better perceptual results than those that are bounded by the sampling theoretical limit.

An expression-invariant 3D face recognition approach is presented. Our basic assumption is that facial expressions can be modelled as isometries of the facial surface. This allows to construct expression-invariant representations of faces using the bending-invariant canonical forms approach. The result is an efficient and accurate face recognition algorithm, robust to facial expressions, that can distinguish between identical twins (the first two authors). We demonstrate a prototype system based on the proposed algorithm and compare its performance to classical face recognition methods. The numerical methods employed by our approach do not require the facial surface explicitly. The surface gradients field, or the surface metric, are sufficient for constructing the expression-invariant representation of any given face. It allows us to perform the 3D face recognition task while avoiding the surface reconstruction stage.

In this paper, we present an efficient way to denoise bivariate data like height fields, color pictures or vector fields, while preserving edges and other features. Mixing surface area minimization, graph flow, and nonlinear edge-preservation metrics, our method generalizes previous anisotropic diffusion approaches in image processing, and is applicable to data of arbitrary dimension. Another notable difference is the use of a more robust discrete differential operator, which captures the fundamental surface properties. We demonstrate the method on range images and height fields, as well as greyscale or color images.

Super-resolution reconstruction produces one or a set of high-resolution images from a sequence of low-resolution frames. This paper reviews a variety of super-resolution methods proposed in the last twenty years, and provides some insight to, and a summary of, our recent contributions to the general super-resolution problem. In the process, a detailed study of several very important aspects of super-resolution, often ignored in the literature, is presented. Specifically, we discuss robustness, treatment of color, and dynamic operation modes. Novel methods for addressing these issues are accompanied by experimental results on simulated and real data. Finally, some future challenges in super-resolution are outlined and discussed.

We present a unified anisotropic geometric diffusion PDE model for smoothing (fairing) out noise both in triangulated twomanifold surface meshes in R³ and functions defined on these surface meshes, while enhancing curve features on both by careful choice of an anisotropic diffusion tensor. We combine the C¹ limit representation of Loop’s subdivision for triangular surface meshes and vector functions on the surface mesh with the established diffusion model to arrive at a discretized version of the diffusion problem in the spatial direction. The time direction discretization then leads to a sparse linear system of equations. Iteratively solving the sparse linear system yields a sequence of faired (smoothed) meshes as well as faired functions.

The bilateral filter is a nonlinear filter that smoothes a signal while preserving strong edges. It has demonstrated great effectiveness for a variety of problems in computer vision and computer graphics, and fast versions have been proposed. Unfortunately, little is known about the accuracy of such accelerations. In this paper, we propose a new signal-processing analysis of the bilateral filter which complements the recent studies that analyzed it as a PDE or as a robust statistical estimator. The key to our analysis is to express the filter in a higher-dimensional space where the signal intensity is added to the original domain dimensions. Importantly, this signal-processing perspective allows us to develop a novel bilateral filtering acceleration using downsampling in space and intensity. This affords a principled expression of accuracy in terms of bandwidth and sampling. The bilateral filter can be expressed as linear convolutions in this augmented space followed by two simple nonlinearities. This allows us to derive criteria for downsampling the key operations and achieving important acceleration of the bilateral filter. We show that, for the same running time, our method is more accurate than previous acceleration techniques. Typically, we are able to process a 2 megapixel image using our acceleration technique in less than a second, and have the result be visually similar to the exact computation that takes several tens of minutes. The acceleration is most effective with large spatial kernels. Furthermore, this approach extends naturally to color images and cross bilateral filtering. 1

Abstract. In a number of disciplines, directional data provides a fundamental source of information. A novel framework for isotropic and anisotropic diffusion of directions is presented in this paper. The framework can be applied both to denoise directional data and to obtain multiscale representations of it. The basic idea is to apply and extend results from the theory of harmonic maps, and in particular, harmonic maps in liquid crystals. This theory deals with the regularization of vectorial data, while satisfying the intrinsic unit norm constraint of directional data. We show the corresponding variational and partial differential equations formulations for isotropic diffusion, obtained from an L2 norm, and edge preserving diffusion, obtained from an L p norm in general and an L1 norm in particular. In contrast with previous approaches, the framework is valid for directions in any dimensions, supports non-smooth data, and gives both isotropic and anisotropic formulations. In addition, the framework of harmonic maps here described can be used to diffuse and analyze general image data defined on general non-flat manifolds, that is, functions between two general manifolds. We present a number of theoretical results, open questions, and examples for gradient vectors, optical flow, and color images.

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