Abstract

This article addresses two important themes in early visual computation: rst it presents a novel theory for learning the universal statistics of natural images { a prior model for typical cluttered scenes of the world { from a set of natural images, second it proposes a general framework of designing reaction-diusion equations for image processing. We start by studying the statistics of natural images including the scale invariant properties, then generic prior models were learned to duplicate the observed statistics, based on the minimax entropy theory studied in two previous papers. The resulting Gibbs distributions have potentials of the form U(I; ; S) = P K I)(x; y)) with S = fF g being a set of lters and = f the potential functions. The learned Gibbs distributions con rm and improve the form of existing prior models such as line-process, but in contrast to all previous models, inverted potentials (i.e. (x) decreasing as a function of jxj) were found to be necessary. We nd that the partial dierential equations given by gradient descent on U(I; ; S) are essentially reaction-diusion equations, where the usual energy terms produce anisotropic diusion while the inverted energy terms produce reaction associated with pattern formation, enhancing preferred image features. We illustrate how these models can be used for texture pattern rendering, denoising, image enhancement and clutter removal by careful choice of both prior and data models of this type, incorporating the appropriate features. Song Chun Zhu is now with the Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, and David Mumford is with the Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912. This work started when the authors were at ...

Citations