Dynamic textures are sequences of images of moving scenes that exhibit certain stationarity properties in time; these include sea-waves, smoke, foliage, whirlwind etc. We present a novel characterization of dynamic textures that poses the problems of modeling, learning, recognizing and synthesizing dynamic textures on a firm analytical footing. We borrow tools from system identification to capture the "essence" of dynamic textures; we do so by learning (i.e. identifying) models that are optimal in the sense of maximum likelihood or minimum prediction error variance. For the special case of second-order stationary processes, we identify the model sub-optimally in closed-form. Once learned, a model has predictive power and can be used for extrapolating synthetic sequences to infinite length with negligible computational cost. We present experimental evidence that, within our framework, even low-dimensional models can capture very complex visual phenomena.

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1 This paper presents a computational paradigm called Data Driven Markov Chain Monte Carlo (DDMCMC) for image segmentation in the Bayesian statistical framework. The paper contributes to image segmentation in three aspects. Firstly, it designs eective and well balanced Markov Chain dynamics to explore the solution space and makes the split and merge process reversible at a middle level vision formulation. Thus it achieves globally optimal solution independent of initial segmentations. Secondly, instead of computing a single maximum a posteriori solution, it proposes a mathematical principle for computing multiple distinct solutions to incorporates intrinsic ambiguities in image segmentation. A k-adventurers algorithm is proposed for extracting distinct multiple solutions from the Markov chain sequence. Thirdly, it utilizes datadriven (bottom-up) techniques, such as clustering and edge detection, to compute importance proposal probabilities, which eectively drive the Markov chain dynamics and achieve tremendous speedup in comparison to traditional jump-diusion method[4]. Thus DDMCMC paradigm provides a unifying framework where the role of existing segmentation algorithms, such as, edge detection, clustering, region growing, split-merge, SNAKEs, region competition, are revealed as either realizing Markov chain dynamics or computing importance proposal probabilities. We report some results on color and grey level image segmentation in this paper and refer to a detailed report and a web site for extensive discussion. 1 Motivation and

Abstract. We develop a scale-invariant version of Matheron’s “dead leaves model ” for the statistics of natural images. The model takes occlusions into account and resembles the image formation process by randomly adding independent elementary shapes, such as disks, in layers. We compare the empirical statistics of two large databases of natural images with the statistics of the occlusion model, and find an excellent qualitative, and good quantitative agreement. At this point, this is the only image model which comes close to duplicating the simplest, elementary statistics of natural images—such as, the scale invariance property of marginal distributions of filter responses, the full co-occurrence statistics of two pixels, and the joint statistics of pairs of Haar wavelet responses. natural images, stochastic image model, non-Gaussian statistics, scaling, dead leaves model, occlu-Keywords: sions, clutter 1.

The statistics of range images from natural environments is a largely unexplored eldofresearch. It closely relates to the statistical modeling of the scene geometry in natural environments, and the modeling of optical natural images. We have use d a 3D laser range- nder to collect range images from mixed forest scenes. The images are hereanalyzed with respect to di erent statistics. 1

We propose a new multiscale image decomposition which offers a hierarchical, adaptive representation for the different features in general images. The starting point is a variational decomposition of an image, f = u0 { + v0, where [u0,v0] is the minimizer of a J-functional, J(f, λ0; X, Y) = infu+v=f ‖u‖X + λ0‖v ‖ p} Y. Such minimizers are standard tools for image manipulations

Abstract. In this paper, we propose a new variational model for image denoising and decomposition, witch combines the total variation minimization model of Rudin, Osher and Fatemi from image restoration, with spaces of oscillatory functions, following recent ideas introduced by Meyer. The spaces introduced here are appropriate to model oscillatory patterns of zero mean, such as noise or texture. Numerical results of image denoising, image decomposition and texture discrimination are presented, showing that the new models decompose better a given image, possible noisy, into cartoon and oscillatory pattern of zero mean, than the standard ones. The present paper develops further the models previously introduced by the authors in Vese and Osher (Modeling textures with total variation minimization and oscillating patterns in image processing, UCLA CAM Report 02-19, May 2002, to appear in Journal of Scientific Computing, 2003). Other recent and related image decomposition models are also discussed.

Natural images contain an overwhelming number of visual patterns generated by diverse stochastic processes. Defining and modeling these patterns is of fundamental importance for generic vision tasks, such as perceptual organization, segmentation, and recognition. The objective of this epistemological paper is to summarize various threads of research in the literature and to pursue a unified framework for conceptualization, modeling, learning, and computing visual patterns. This paper starts with reviewing four research streams: 1) the study of image statistics, 2) the analysis of image components, 3) the grouping of image elements, and 4) the modeling of visual patterns. The models from these research streams are then divided into four categories according to their semantic structures: 1) descriptive models, i.e., Markov random fields (MRF) or Gibbs, 2) variants of descriptive models (causal MRF and "pseudodescriptive" models), 3) generative models, and 4) discriminative models. The objectives, principles, theories, and typical models are reviewed in each category and the relationships between the four types of models are studied. Two central themes emerge from the relationship studies.

This paper is based on a plenary presentation given by Tony F. Chan at the 2002 Joint Mathematical Meeting, San Diego, and has been supported in part by NSF under grant numbers DMS-9973341 (Chan), DMS-0202565 (Shen), and ITR-0113439 (Vese), by ONR under N00014-02-1-0015 (Chan), and by NIH under NIH-P20MH65166 (Chan and Vese). For the preprints and reprints mentioned in this paper, please visit our web site at: www.math.ucla.edu/~imagers. Chan and Vese are with the Department of Mathematics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, fchan, lveseg@math.ucla.edu; Shen is with the School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, jhshen@math.umn.edu

Image denoising algorithms often assume an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) process that is independent of the actual RGB values. Such approaches cannot effectively remove color noise produced by today’s CCD digital camera. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for two tasks: automatic estimation and removal of color noise from a single image using piecewise smooth image models. We introduce the noise level function (NLF), which is a continuous function describing the noise level as a function of image brightness. We then estimate an upper bound of the real NLF by fitting a lower envelope to the standard deviations of per-segment image variances. For denoising, the chrominance of color noise is significantly removed by projecting pixel values onto a line fit to the RGB values in each segment. Then, a Gaussian conditional random field (GCRF) is constructed to obtain the underlying clean image from the noisy input. Extensive experiments are conducted to test the proposed algorithm, which is shown to outperform state-of-the-art denoising algorithms.