A new algorithm for unsupervised global and local color correction

Automated precision beekeeping for accessing bee brood development and behaviour using deep CNN

Bees play a significant role in the health of terrestrial ecosystems. The decline of bee populations due to colony collapse disorder around the world constitutes a severe ecological danger. Maintaining high yield of honey and understanding of bee behaviour necessitate constant attention to the hives. Research initiatives have been taken to establish monitoring programs to study the behaviour of bees in accessing their habitat. Monitoring the sanitation and development of bee brood allows for preventative measures to be taken against mite infections and an overall improvement in the brood's health. This study proposed a precision beekeeping method that aims to reduce bee colony mortality and improve conventional apiculture through the use of technological tools to gather, analyse, and understand bee colony characteristics. This research presents the application of advanced digital image processing with computer vision techniques for the visual identification and analysis of bee brood at various developing stages. The beehive images are first preprocessed to enhance the important features of object. Further, object is segmented and classified using computer vision techniques. The research is carried out with the images containing variety of immature brood stages. The suggested method and existing methods are tested and compared to evaluate efficiency of proposed methodology.

Image Colorization Algorithm Based on Deep Learning

As we know, image colorization is widely used in computer graphics and has become a research hotspot in the field of image processing. Current image colorization technology has the phenomenon of single coloring effect and unreal color, which is too complicated to be implemented and struggled to gain popularity. In this paper, a new method based on a convolution neural network is proposed to study the reasonable coloring of human images and ensures the realism of the coloring effect and the diversity of coloring at the same time. First, this paper selects about 5000 pictures of people and plants from the Imagenet dataset and makes a small dataset containing only people and backgrounds. Secondly, in order to obtain the image segmentation results, this paper improves the U-net network and carries out three times of down sampling and three times of up-sampling. Finally, we add the expanded convolution, and use the sigmoid activation function to replace the ReLU (The Rectified Linear Unit) activation function and put the BN (Batch Normalization) before the activation function. Experimental results show that our proposed image colorization algorithm based on the deep learning scheme can reduce the training time of the network and achieve higher quality segmentation results.

Research of Maritime Object Detection Method in Foggy Environment Based on Improved Model SRC-YOLO

An improved maritime object detection algorithm, SRC-YOLO, based on the YOLOv4-tiny, is proposed in the foggy environment to address the issues of false detection, missed detection, and low detection accuracy in complicated situations. To confirm the model's validity, an ocean dataset containing various concentrations of haze, target angles, and sizes was produced for the research. Firstly, the Single Scale Retinex (SSR) algorithm was applied to preprocess the dataset to reduce the interference of the complex scenes on the ocean. Secondly, in order to increase the model's receptive field, we employed a modified Receptive Field Block (RFB) module in place of the standard convolution in the Neck part of the model. Finally, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), which integrates channel and spatial information, was introduced to raise detection performance by expanding the network model's attention to the context information in the feature map and the object location points. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved SRC-YOLO model effectively detects marine targets in foggy scenes by increasing the mean Average Precision (mAP) of detection results from 79.56% to 86.15%.

Automated image analysis to assess hygienic behaviour of honeybees

Focus of this study is to design an automated image processing pipeline for handling uncontrolled acquisition conditions of images acquired in the field. The pipeline has been tested on the automated identification and count of uncapped brood cells in honeybee (Apis Mellifera) comb images to reduce the workload of beekeepers during the study of the hygienic behavior of honeybee colonies. The images used to develop and test the model were acquired by beekeepers on different days and hours in summer 2020 and under uncontrolled conditions. This resulted in images differing for background noise, illumination, color, comb tilts, scaling, and comb sizes. All the available 127 images were manually cropped to approximately include the comb area. To obtain an unbiased evaluation, the cropped images were randomly split into a training image set (50 images), which was used to develop and tune the proposed model, and a test image set (77 images), which was solely used to test the model. To reduce the effects of varied illuminations or exposures, three image enhancement algorithms were tested and compared followed by the Hough Transform, which allowed identifying individual cells to be automatically counted. All the algorithm parameters were automatically chosen on the training set by grid search. When applied to the 77 test images the model obtained a correlation of 0.819 between the automated counts and the experts' counts. To provide an assessment of our model with publicly available images acquired by a different equipment and under different acquisition conditions, we randomly extracted 100 images from a comb image dataset made available by a recent literature work. Though it has been acquired under controlled exposure, the images in this new set have varied illuminations; anyhow, our pipeline obtains a correlation between automatic and manual counts equal to 0.997. In conclusion, our tests on the automatic count of uncapped honey bee comb cells acquired in the field and on images extracted from a publicly available dataset suggest that the hereby generated pipeline successfully handles varied noise artifacts, illumination, and exposure conditions, therefore allowing to generalize our method to different acquisition settings. Results further improve when the acquisition conditions are controlled.

Review of Machine Learning Applications Using Retinal Fundus Images

Automating screening and diagnosis in the medical field saves time and reduces the chances of misdiagnosis while saving on labor and cost for physicians. With the feasibility and development of deep learning methods, machines are now able to interpret complex features in medical data, which leads to rapid advancements in automation. Such efforts have been made in ophthalmology to analyze retinal images and build frameworks based on analysis for the identification of retinopathy and the assessment of its severity. This paper reviews recent state-of-the-art works utilizing the color fundus image taken from one of the imaging modalities used in ophthalmology. Specifically, the deep learning methods of automated screening and diagnosis for diabetic retinopathy (DR), age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and glaucoma are investigated. In addition, the machine learning techniques applied to the retinal vasculature extraction from the fundus image are covered. The challenges in developing these systems are also discussed.

Deep Learning Approaches Towards Skin Lesion Segmentation and Classification from Dermoscopic Images - A Review

BACKGROUND

Automated intelligent systems for unbiased diagnosis are primary requirement for the pigment lesion analysis. It has gained the attention of researchers in the last few decades. These systems involve multiple phases such as pre-processing, feature extraction, segmentation, classification and post processing. It is crucial to accurately localize and segment the skin lesion. It is observed that recent enhancements in machine learning algorithms and dermoscopic techniques reduced the misclassification rate therefore, the focus towards computer aided systems increased exponentially in recent years. Computer aided diagnostic systems are reliable source for dermatologists to analyze the type of cancer, but it is widely acknowledged that even higher accuracy is needed for computer aided diagnostic systems to be adopted practically in the diagnostic process of life threatening diseases.

INTRODUCTION

Skin cancer is one of the most threatening cancers. It occurs by the abnormal multiplication of cells. The core three types of skin cells are: Squamous, Basal and Melanocytes. There are two wide classes of skin cancer; Melanocytic and non-Melanocytic. It is difficult to differentiate between benign and malignant melanoma, therefore dermatologists sometimes misclassify the benign and malignant melanoma. Melanoma is estimated as 19th most frequent cancer, it is riskier than the Basel and Squamous carcinoma because it rapidly spreads throughout the body. Hence, to lower the death risk, it is critical to diagnose the correct type of cancer in early rudimentary phases. It can occur on any part of body, but it has higher probability to occur on chest, back and legs.

METHODS

The paper presents a review of segmentation and classification techniques for skin lesion detection. Dermoscopy and its features are discussed briefly. After that Image pre-processing techniques are described. A thorough review of segmentation and classification phases of skin lesion detection using deep learning techniques is presented Literature is discussed and a comparative analysis of discussed methods is presented.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have presented the survey of more than 100 papers and comparative analysis of state of the art techniques, model and methodologies. Malignant melanoma is one of the most threating and deadliest cancers. Since the last few decades, researchers are putting extra attention and effort in accurate diagnosis of melanoma. The main challenges of dermoscopic skin lesion images are: low contrasts, multiple lesions, irregular and fuzzy borders, blood vessels, regression, hairs, bubbles, variegated coloring and other kinds of distortions. The lack of large training dataset makes these problems even more challenging. Due to recent advancement in the paradigm of deep learning, and specially the outstanding performance in medical imaging, it has become important to review the deep learning algorithms performance in skin lesion segmentation. Here, we have discussed the results of different techniques on the basis of different evaluation parameters such as Jaccard coefficient, sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. And the paper listed down the major achievements in this domain with the detailed discussion of the techniques. In future, it is expected to improve results by utilizing the capabilities of deep learning frameworks with other pre and post processing techniques so reliable and accurate diagnostic systems can be built.

Explainable Machine Learning for Early Assessment of COVID-19 Risk Prediction in Emergency Departments

Between January and October of 2020, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus has infected more than 34 million persons in a worldwide pandemic leading to over one million deaths worldwide (data from the Johns Hopkins University). Since the virus begun to spread, emergency departments were busy with COVID-19 patients for whom a quick decision regarding in- or outpatient care was required. The virus can cause characteristic abnormalities in chest radiographs (CXR), but, due to the low sensitivity of CXR, additional variables and criteria are needed to accurately predict risk. Here, we describe a computerized system primarily aimed at extracting the most relevant radiological, clinical, and laboratory variables for improving patient risk prediction, and secondarily at presenting an explainable machine learning system, which may provide simple decision criteria to be used by clinicians as a support for assessing patient risk. To achieve robust and reliable variable selection, Boruta and Random Forest (RF) are combined in a 10-fold cross-validation scheme to produce a variable importance estimate not biased by the presence of surrogates. The most important variables are then selected to train a RF classifier, whose rules may be extracted, simplified, and pruned to finally build an associative tree, particularly appealing for its simplicity. Results show that the radiological score automatically computed through a neural network is highly correlated with the score computed by radiologists, and that laboratory variables, together with the number of comorbidities, aid risk prediction. The prediction performance of our approach was compared to that that of generalized linear models and shown to be effective and robust. The proposed machine learning-based computational system can be easily deployed and used in emergency departments for rapid and accurate risk prediction in COVID-19 patients.

Evidence for the intrinsically nonlinear nature of receptive fields in vision

The responses of visual neurons, as well as visual perception phenomena in general, are highly nonlinear functions of the visual input, while most vision models are grounded on the notion of a linear receptive field (RF). The linear RF has a number of inherent problems: it changes with the input, it presupposes a set of basis functions for the visual system, and it conflicts with recent studies on dendritic computations. Here we propose to model the RF in a nonlinear manner, introducing the intrinsically nonlinear receptive field (INRF). Apart from being more physiologically plausible and embodying the efficient representation principle, the INRF has a key property of wide-ranging implications: for several vision science phenomena where a linear RF must vary with the input in order to predict responses, the INRF can remain constant under different stimuli. We also prove that Artificial Neural Networks with INRF modules instead of linear filters have a remarkably improved performance and better emulate basic human perception. Our results suggest a change of paradigm for vision science as well as for artificial intelligence.

Variational model for simultaneously image denoising and contrast enhancement

The performance of contrast enhancement is degraded when input images are noisy. In this paper, we propose and develop a variational model for simultaneously image denoising and contrast enhancement. The idea is to propose a variational approach containing an energy functional to adjust the pixel values of an input image directly so that the resulting histogram can be redistributed to be uniform and the noise of the image can be removed. In the proposed model, a histogram equalization term is considered for image contrast enhancement, a total variational term is incorporate to remove the noise of the input image, and a fidelity term is added to keep the structure and the texture of the input image. The existence of the minimizer and the convergence of the proposed algorithm are studied and analyzed. Experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed model compared with existing methods in terms of several measures: average local contrast, discrete entropy, structural similarity index, measure of enhancement, absolute measure of enhancement, and second derivative like measure of enhancement.

Generalized equation for real-world image enhancement by Milano Retinex family

Milano Retinexes are spatial color algorithms grounded on the Retinex theory and widely applied to enhance the visual content of real-world color images. In this framework, they process the color channels of the input image independently and re-scale channel by channel the intensity of each pixel p by the so-called local reference white, i.e., a strictly positive value, computed by reworking a set of features sampled around p. The neighborhood of p to be sampled, its sampling, the features to be processed, as well as the mathematical model for the computation of the local reference white vary from algorithm to algorithm, determining different levels of enhancement. Based on the analysis of a group of Milano Retinexes, this work proves that the Milano Retinex local reference whites can be expressed by a generalized equation whose parameters model specific aspects of the Milano Retinex spatial color processing. In particular, tuning these parameters leads to different Milano Retinex implementations. This study contributes to a better understanding of the similarities and differences among the members of the Milano Retinex family, and provides new taxonomic schemes of them based on their own mathematical properties.

STAR: A Segmentation-Based Approximation of Point-Based Sampling Milano Retinex for Color Image Enhancement

Milano Retinex is a family of spatial color algorithms inspired by Retinex and mainly devoted to the image enhancement. In the so-called point-based sampling Milano Retinex algorithms, this task is accomplished by processing the color of each image pixel based on a set of colors sampled in its surround. This paper presents STAR, a segmentation based approximation of the point-based sampling Milano Retinex approaches: it replaces the pixel-wise image sampling by a novel, computationally efficient procedure that detects once for all the color and spatial information relevant to image enhancement from clusters of pixels output by a segmentation. The experiments reported here show that STAR performs similarly to previous point-based sampling Milano Retinex approaches and that STAR enhancement improves the accuracy of the well-known algorithm scale-invariant feature transform on the description and matching of photographs captured under difficult light conditions.

Smartphone-based analytical biosensors

With the rapid development, mass production, and pervasive distribution of smartphones in recent years, they have provided people with portable, cost-effective, and easy-to-operate platforms to build analytical biosensors for point-of-care (POC) applications and mobile health.

GRASS: A Gradient-Based Random Sampling Scheme for Milano Retinex

Retinex is an early and famous theory attempting to estimate the human color sensation derived from an observed scene. When applied to a digital image, the original implementation of retinex estimates the color sensation by modifying the pixels channel intensities with respect to a local reference white, selected from a set of random paths. The spatial search of the local reference white influences the final estimation. The recent algorithm energy-driven termite retinex (ETR), as well as its predecessor termite retinex, has introduced a new path-based image aware sampling scheme, where the paths depend on local visual properties of the input image. Precisely, the ETR paths transit over pixels with high gradient magnitude that have been proved to be important for the formation of color sensation. Such a sampling method enables the visit of image portions effectively relevant to the estimation of the color sensation, while it reduces the analysis of pixels with less essential and/or redundant data, i.e., the flat image regions. While the ETR sampling scheme is very efficacious in detecting image pixels salient for the color sensation, its computational complexity can be a limit. In this paper, we present a novel Gradient-based RAndom Sampling Scheme that inherits from ETR the image aware sampling principles, but has a lower computational complexity, while similar performance. Moreover, the new sampling scheme can be interpreted both as a path-based scanning and a 2D sampling.

GREAT: a gradient-based color-sampling scheme for Retinex

Modeling the local color spatial distribution is a crucial step for the algorithms of the Milano Retinex family. Here we present GREAT, a novel, noise-free Milano Retinex implementation based on an image-aware spatial color sampling. For each channel of a color input image, GREAT computes a 2D set of edges whose magnitude exceeds a pre-defined threshold. Then GREAT re-scales the channel intensity of each image pixel, called target, by the average of the intensities of the selected edges weighted by a function of their positions, gradient magnitudes, and intensities relative to the target. In this way, GREAT enhances the input image, adjusting its brightness, contrast and dynamic range. The use of the edges as pixels relevant to color filtering is justified by the importance that edges play in human color sensation. The name GREAT comes from the expression "Gradient RElevAnce for ReTinex," which refers to the threshold-based definition of a gradient relevance map for edge selection and thus for image color filtering.

Incorporating Colour Information for Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Melanoma from Dermoscopy Images: A Retrospective Survey and Critical Analysis

Cutaneous melanoma is the most life-threatening form of skin cancer. Although advanced melanoma is often considered as incurable, if detected and excised early, the prognosis is promising. Today, clinicians use computer vision in an increasing number of applications to aid early detection of melanoma through dermatological image analysis (dermoscopy images, in particular). Colour assessment is essential for the clinical diagnosis of skin cancers. Due to this diagnostic importance, many studies have either focused on or employed colour features as a constituent part of their skin lesion analysis systems. These studies range from using low-level colour features, such as simple statistical measures of colours occurring in the lesion, to availing themselves of high-level semantic features such as the presence of blue-white veil, globules, or colour variegation in the lesion. This paper provides a retrospective survey and critical analysis of contributions in this research direction.

Retinal Lateral Inhibition Provides the Biological Basis of Long-Range Spatial Induction

Retinal lateral inhibition is one of the conventional efficient coding mechanisms in the visual system that is produced by interneurons that pool signals over a neighborhood of presynaptic feedforward cells and send inhibitory signals back to them. Thus, the receptive-field (RF) of a retinal ganglion cell has a center-surround receptive-field (RF) profile that is classically represented as a difference-of-Gaussian (DOG) adequate for efficient spatial contrast coding. The DOG RF profile has been attributed to produce the psychophysical phenomena of brightness induction, in which the perceived brightness of an object is affected by that of its vicinity, either shifting away from it (brightness contrast) or becoming more similar to it (brightness assimilation) depending on the size of the surfaces surrounding the object. While brightness contrast can be modeled using a DOG with a narrow surround, brightness assimilation requires a wide suppressive surround. Early retinal studies determined that the suppressive surround of a retinal ganglion cell is narrow (< 100–300 μm; ‘classic RF’), which led researchers to postulate that brightness assimilation must originate at some post-retinal, possibly cortical, stage where long-range interactions are feasible. However, more recent studies have reported that the retinal interneurons also exhibit a spatially wide component (> 500–1000 μm). In the current study, we examine the effect of this wide interneuron RF component in two biophysical retinal models and show that for both of the retinal models it explains the long-range effect evidenced in simultaneous brightness induction phenomena and that the spatial extent of this long-range effect of the retinal model responses matches that of perceptual data. These results suggest that the retinal lateral inhibition mechanism alone can regulate local as well as long-range spatial induction through the narrow and wide RF components of retinal interneurons, arguing against the existing view that spatial induction is operated by two separate local vs. long-range mechanisms.

A population-based approach to point-sampling spatial color algorithms

Inspired by the behavior of the human visual system, spatial color algorithms perform image enhancement by correcting the pixel channel lightness based on the spatial distribution of the intensities in the surrounding area. The two visual contrast enhancement algorithms RSR and STRESS belong to this family of models: they rescale the input based on local reference values, which are determined by exploring the image by means of random point samples, called sprays. Due to the use of sampling, they may yield a noisy output. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic formulation of the two models: our algorithms (RSR-P and STRESS-P) rely implicitly on the whole population of possible sprays. For processing larger images, we also provide two approximated algorithms that exploit a suitable target-dependent space quantization. Those spray population-based formulations outperform RSR and STRESS in terms of the processing time required for the production of noiseless outputs. We argue that this population-based approach, which can be extended to other members of the family, complements the sampling-based approach, in that it offers not only a better control in the design of approximated algorithms, but also additional insight into individual models and their relationships. We illustrate the latter point by providing a model of halo artifact formation.

Fusion of infrared and visible images for night-vision context enhancement

Because of the poor lighting conditions at night time, visible images are often fused with corresponding infrared (IR) images for context enhancement of the scenes in night vision. In this paper, we present a novel night-vision context enhancement algorithm through IR and visible image fusion with the guided filter. First, to enhance the visibility of poorly illuminated details in the visible image before the fusion, an adaptive enhancement method is developed by incorporating the processes of dynamic range compression and contrast restoration based on the guided filter. Then, a hybrid multi-scale decomposition based on the guided filter is introduced to inject the IR image information into the visible image through a multi-scale fusion approach. Moreover, a perceptual-based regularization parameter selection method is used to determine the relative amount of the injected IR spectral features by comparing the perceptual saliency of the IR and visible image information. This fusion method can successfully transfer the important IR image information into the fused image, and simultaneously preserve the details and background scenery in the input visible image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to achieve better context enhancement results in night vision.

Energy-driven path search for Termite Retinex

The human color sensation depends on the local and global spatial arrangements of the colors in the scene. Emulating this dependence requires the exploration of the image in search of a white reference. The algorithm Termite Retinex explores the image by a set of paths resembling traces of a swarm of termites. Starting from this approach, we develop a novel spatial exploration scheme where the termite paths are local minimums of an energy function, which depend on the image visual content. The energy is designed to favor the visitation of regions containing information relevant to the color sensation while minimizing the coverage of less essential regions. This exploration method contributes to the investigation of the spatial properties of the color sensation and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first model relying on mathematical global conditions for the Retinex paths. The experiments show that the estimation of the color sensation obtained by means of the proposed spatial sampling is a valid alternative to the one based on Termite Retinex.

Tuning the locality of filtering with a spatially weighted implementation of random spray Retinex

The human color sensation depends on the spatial distribution of the colors in the viewed scene. This principle is at the basis of the random spray Retinex (RSR) algorithm. In this work, we modify RSR by integrating its approach with a method to weight and tune the locality of spatial image information. This modification allows for spatial control of the local effect of RSR on image color filtering. We study the performances of this spatially weighted version of RSR on a public image dataset by analyzing and comparing several image features of the output image and its local properties.

Processing the image gradient field using a topographic primal sketch approach

The spatial derivatives of the image intensity provide topographic information that may be used to identify and segment objects. The accurate computation of the derivatives is often hampered in medical images by the presence of noise and a limited resolution. This paper focuses on accurate computation of spatial derivatives and their subsequent use to process an image gradient field directly, from which an image with improved characteristics can be reconstructed. The improvements include noise reduction, contrast enhancement, thinning object contours and the preservation of edges. Processing the gradient field directly instead of the image is shown to have numerous benefits. The approach is developed such that the steps are modular, allowing the overall method to be improved and possibly tailored to different applications. As presented, the approach relies on a topographic representation and primal sketch of an image. Comparisons with existing image processing methods on a synthetic image and different medical images show improved results and accuracy in segmentation. Here, the focus is on objects with low spatial resolution, which is often the case in medical images. The methods developed show the importance of improved accuracy in derivative calculation and the potential in processing the image gradient field directly. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mobile Image Based Color Correction Using Deblurring

Dietary intake, the process of determining what someone eats during the course of a day, provides valuable insights for mounting intervention programs for prevention of many chronic diseases such as obesity and cancer. The goals of the Technology Assisted Dietary Assessment (TADA) System, developed at Purdue University, is to automatically identify and quantify foods and beverages consumed by utilizing food images acquired with a mobile device. Color correction serves as a critical step to ensure accurate food identification and volume estimation. We make use of a specifically designed color checkerboard (i.e. a fiducial marker) to calibrate the imaging system so that the variations of food appearance under different lighting conditions can be determined. In this paper, we propose an image quality enhancement technique by combining image de-blurring and color correction. The contribution consists of introducing an automatic camera shake removal method using a saliency map and improving the polynomial color correction model using the LMS color space.

Underwater image quality enhancement through composition of dual-intensity images and Rayleigh-stretching

The quality of underwater image is poor due to the properties of water and its impurities. The properties of water cause attenuation of light travels through the water medium, resulting in low contrast, blur, inhomogeneous lighting, and color diminishing of the underwater images. This paper proposes a method of enhancing the quality of underwater image. The proposed method consists of two stages. At the first stage, the contrast correction technique is applied to the image, where the image is applied with the modified Von Kries hypothesis and stretching the image into two different intensity images at the average value with respects to Rayleigh distribution. At the second stage, the color correction technique is applied to the image where the image is first converted into hue-saturation-value (HSV) color model. The modification of the color component increases the image color performance. Qualitative and quantitative analyses indicate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of contrast, details, and noise reduction.

QBRIX: a quantile-based approach to retinex

In this paper, we introduce a novel probabilistic version of retinex. It is based on a probabilistic formalization of the random spray retinex sampling and contributes to the investigation of the spatial properties of the model. Various versions available of the retinex algorithm are characterized by different procedures for exploring the image content (so as to obtain, for each pixel, a reference white value), then used to rescale the pixel lightness. Here we propose an alternative procedure, which computes the reference white value from the percentile values of the pixel population. We formalize two versions of the algorithm: one with global and one with local behavior, characterized by different computational costs.

Fast Hue and Range Preserving Histogram: Specification: Theory and New Algorithms for Color Image Enhancement

Color image enhancement is a complex and challenging task in digital imaging with abundant applications. Preserving the hue of the input image is crucial in a wide range of situations. We propose simple image enhancement algorithms which conserve the hue and preserve the range (gamut) of the R, G, B channels in an optimal way. In our setup, the intensity input image is transformed into a target intensity image whose histogram matches a specified, well-behaved histogram. We derive a new color assignment methodology where the resulting enhanced image fits the target intensity image. We analyse the obtained algorithms in terms of chromaticity improvement and compare them with the unique and quite popular histogram based hue and range preserving algorithm of Naik and Murthy. Numerical tests confirm our theoretical results and show that our algorithms perform much better than the Naik-Murthy algorithm. In spite of their simplicity, they compete with well-established alternative methods for images where hue-preservation is desired.

Variational Bayesian method for Retinex

In this paper, we propose a variational Bayesian method for Retinex to simulate and interpret how the human visual system perceives color. To construct a hierarchical Bayesian model, we use the Gibbs distributions as prior distributions for the reflectance and the illumination, and the gamma distributions for the model parameters. By assuming that the reflection function is piecewise continuous and illumination function is spatially smooth, we define the energy functions in the Gibbs distributions as a total variation function and a smooth function for the reflectance and the illumination, respectively. We then apply the variational Bayes approximation to obtain the approximation of the posterior distribution of unknowns so that the unknown images and hyperparameters are estimated simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method for providing competitive performance without additional information about the unknown parameters, and when prior information is added the proposed method outperforms the non-Bayesian-based Retinex methods we compared.

From image processing to computational neuroscience: a neural model based on histogram equalization

There are many ways in which the human visual system works to reduce the inherent redundancy of the visual information in natural scenes, coding it in an efficient way. The non-linear response curves of photoreceptors and the spatial organization of the receptive fields of visual neurons both work toward this goal of efficient coding. A related, very important aspect is that of the existence of post-retinal mechanisms for contrast enhancement that compensate for the blurring produced in early stages of the visual process. And alongside mechanisms for coding and wiring efficiency, there is neural activity in the human visual cortex that correlates with the perceptual phenomenon of lightness induction. In this paper we propose a neural model that is derived from an image processing technique for histogram equalization, and that is able to deal with all the aspects just mentioned: this new model is able to predict lightness induction phenomena, and improves the efficiency of the representation by flattening both the histogram and the power spectrum of the image signal.

A no-reference perceptual based contrast enhancement metric for ocean scenes in fog

In this paper, we develop a perceptually based contrast enhancement metric as a means to solve the problem of autonomously enhancing images degraded by fog that are perceptually pleasing to humans. A learning based approach is considered to develop the contrast enhancement using human observations and low-level contrast enhancement metrics based on the human vision system. In addition, we provide new low-level metrics based on the physics of the scene to improve the performance of existing contrast enhancement metrics. This paper shows that a contrast enhancement metric can be designed to mimic human preference.

Noise reduction based on partial-reference, dual-tree complex wavelet transform shrinkage

This paper presents a novel way to reduce noise introduced or exacerbated by image enhancement methods, in particular algorithms based on the random spray sampling technique, but not only. According to the nature of sprays, output images of spray-based methods tend to exhibit noise with unknown statistical distribution. To avoid inappropriate assumptions on the statistical characteristics of noise, a different one is made. In fact, the non-enhanced image is considered to be either free of noise or affected by non-perceivable levels of noise. Taking advantage of the higher sensitivity of the human visual system to changes in brightness, the analysis can be limited to the luma channel of both the non-enhanced and enhanced image. Also, given the importance of directional content in human vision, the analysis is performed through the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTWCT). Unlike the discrete wavelet transform, the DTWCT allows for distinction of data directionality in the transform space. For each level of the transform, the standard deviation of the non-enhanced image coefficients is computed across the six orientations of the DTWCT, then it is normalized. The result is a map of the directional structures present in the non-enhanced image. Said map is then used to shrink the coefficients of the enhanced image. The shrunk coefficients and the coefficients from the non-enhanced image are then mixed according to data directionality. Finally, a noise-reduced version of the enhanced image is computed via the inverse transforms. A thorough numerical analysis of the results has been performed in order to confirm the validity of the proposed approach.

Implementing the Retinex algorithm with Wilson-Cowan equations

It is shown that a form of the Wilson-Cowan equations representing large-scale activity in interacting neural populations can implement a form of the Retinex algorithm for color vision. It has also been shown recently that a color enhancement algorithm closely related to Retinex can be derived from a variational principle. It follows that a variational principle exists for equations of Wilson-Cowan type. Thus the Wilson-Cowan equations are the Euler-Lagrange solution of the minimization of an energy functional. This result suggests many interesting neural applications.

A perceptually inspired variational framework for color enhancement

Basic phenomenology of human color vision has been widely taken as an inspiration to devise explicit color correction algorithms. The behavior of these models in terms of significative image features (such as, e.g., contrast and dispersion) can be difficult to characterize. To cope with this, we propose to use a variational formulation of color contrast enhancement that is inspired by the basic phenomenology of color perception. In particular, we devise a set of basic requirements to be fulfilled by an energy to be considered as 'perceptually inspired', showing that there is an explicit class of functionals satisfying all of them. We single out three explicit functionals that we consider of basic interest, showing similarities and differences with existing models. The minima of such functionals is computed using a gradient descent approach. We also present a general methodology to reduce the computational cost of the algorithms under analysis from O(N2) to O(N logN), being N the number of pixels of the input image.

A spatially variant white-patch and gray-world method for color image enhancement driven by local contrast

Starting from the revolutionary Retinex by Land and McCann, several further perceptually inspired color correction models have been developed with different aims, e.g. reproduction of color sensation, robust features recognition, enhancement of color images. Such models have a differential, spatially-variant and non-linear nature and they can coarsely be distinguished between white-patch (WP) and gray-world (GW) algorithms. In this paper we show that the combination of a pure WP algorithm (Random Spray Retinex (RSR) )and an essentially GW one (Automatic Color Equalization (ACE)) leads to a more robust and better performing model (RACE). The choice of RSR and ACE follows from the recent identification of a unified spatially-variant approach for both algorithms. Mathematically, the originally distinct non-linear and differential mechanisms of RSR and ACE have been fused using the spray technique and local average operations. The investigation of RACE allowed us to put in evidence a common drawback of differential models: corruption of uniform image areas. To overcome this intrinsic defect, we devised a local and global contrast-based and image-driven regulation mechanism that has a general applicability to perceptually inspired color correction algorithms. Tests, comparisons and discussions are presented.

Perceptual color correction through variational techniques

In this paper, we present a discussion about perceptual-based color correction of digital images in the framework of variational techniques. We propose a novel image functional whose minimization produces a perceptually inspired color enhanced version of the original. The variational formulation permits a more flexible local control of contrast adjustment and attachment to data. We show that a numerical implementation of the gradient descent technique applied to this energy functional coincides with the equation of automatic color enhancement (ACE), a particular perceptual-based model of color enhancement. Moreover, we prove that a numerical approximation of the Euler-Lagrange equation reduces the computational complexity of ACE from theta(N2) to theta(N log N), where N is the total number of pixels in the image.

Random spray Retinex: a new Retinex implementation to investigate the local properties of the model

In order to investigate the local filtering behavior of the Retinex model, we propose a new implementation in which paths are replaced by 2-D pixel sprays, hence the name "random spray Retinex." A peculiar feature of this implementation is the way its parameters can be controlled to perform spatial investigation. The parameters' tuning is accomplished by an unsupervised method based on quantitative measures. This procedure has been validated via user panel tests. Furthermore, the spray approach has faster performances than the path-wise one. Tests and results are presented and discussed.