Abstract—Many image processing problems are ill posed and must be regularized. Usually, a roughness penalty is imposed on the solution. The difficulty is to avoid the smoothing of edges, which are very important attributes of the image. In this paper, we first give conditions for the design of such an edge-preserving regularization. Under these conditions, we show that it is possible to introduce an auxiliary variable whose role is twofold. First, it marks the discontinuities and ensures their preservation from smoothing. Second, it makes the criterion half-quadratic. The optimization is then easier. We propose a deterministic strategy, based on alternate minimizations on the image and the auxiliary variable. This leads to the definition of an original reconstruction algorithm, called ARTUR. Some theoretical properties of ARTUR are discussed. Experimental results illustrate the behavior of the algorithm. These results are shown in the field of tomography, but this method can be applied in a large number of applications in image processing. I.

In this paper we address the issue of recovering and segmenting the apparent velocity field in sequences of images. As for motion estimation, we minimize an objective function involving two robust terms. The first one cautiously captures the optical flow constraint, while the second (a priori) term incorporates a discontinuity-preserving smoothness constraint. To cope with the nonconvex minimization problem thus defined, we design an efficient deterministic multigrid procedure. It converges fast toward estimates of good quality, while revealing the large discontinuity structures of flow fields. We then propose an extension of the model by attaching to it a flexible object-based segmentation device based on deformable closed curves (different families of curve equipped with different kinds of prior can be easily supported). Experimental results on synthetic and natural sequences are presented, including an analysis of sensitivity to parameter tuning. INdex Terms--- Closed segmenting cu...

In this paper we show that a classic optical ow technique by Nagel and Enkelmann (1986) can be regarded as an early anisotropic diusion method with a diusion tensor. We introduce three improvements into the model formulation that (i) avoid inconsistencies caused by centering the brightness term and the smoothness term in dierent images, (ii) use a linear scale-space focusing strategy from coarse to ne scales for avoiding convergence to physically irrelevant local minima, and (iii) create an energy functional that is invariant under linear brightness changes. Applying a gradient descent method to the resulting energy functional leads to a system of diusion{reaction equations. We prove that this system has a unique solution under realistic assumptions on the initial data, and we present an ecient linear implicit numerical scheme in detail. Our method creates ow elds with 100 % density over the entire image domain, it is robust under a large range of parameter variations, and it c...

Many differential methods for the recovery of the optic flow field from an image sequence can be expressed in terms of a variational problem where the optic flow minimizes some energy. Typically, these energy functionals consist of two terms: a data term, which requires e.g. that a brightness constancy assumption holds, and a regularizer that encourages global or piecewise smoothness of the flow field. In this paper we present a systematic classification of rotation invariant convex regularizers by exploring their connection to diffusion filters for multichannel images. This taxonomy provides a unifying framework for data-driven and flow-driven, isotropic and anisotropic, as well as spatial and spatio-temporal regularizers. While some of these techniques are classic methods from the literature, others are derived here for the first time. We prove that all these methods are well-posed: they posses a unique solution that depends in a continuous way on the initial data. An interesting structural relation between isotropic and anisotropic flow-driven regularizers is identified, and a design criterion is proposed for constructing anisotropic flow-driven regularizers in a simple and direct way from isotropic ones. Its use is illustrated by several examples.

In this paper, the regularized estimation of the displacement vector field (DVF) of a dynamic image sequence is considered. A new class of non-quadratic convex regularization functionals is employed to estimate the motion field in the presence of motion discontinuities and occlusions. The derivation of the functionals is based on entropy considerations and do not require parameter tuning as in previously proposed methods. This new class of functionals is both robust and convex making it possible to preserve motion boundaries and obtain a globally optimum solution. The performance of entropic functionals is compared to previously suggested functionals for motion estimation using real and synthetic image sequences.

A new motion field representation based on the boundary-control vector (BCV) scheme for video coding is examined in this work. With this scheme, the motion field is characterized by a set of control vectors and boundary functions. The control vectors are associated with the center points of blocks to control the overall motion behavior. We use the boundary functions to specify the continuity of the motion field across adjacentblocks. For BCV-based motion field estimation, an optimization framework based on the Markov random field model and maximum aposterior (MAP) criterion is used. The new scheme effectively represents complex motions such as translation, rotation, zooming and deformation and does not require complex scene analysis. Compared with MPEG of similar decoded SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) quality, 15-65% bit rate saving can be achieved in the proposed scheme with a more pleasant visual quality.