Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper a multi-scale image enhancement strategy using wavelets as applied to digital mammograms is presented. For multiresolution wavelet analysis redundant dyadic discrete wavelet transform is utilized to allow translation invariance and low resolution enhancement capability. Two alternative nonlinear gain adjustments, piecewise linear and Gaussian form of gain adjustment are used for coefficient modification for the enhancement of subtle details such as microcalcification and low resolution edges of different lesion types. The results of comparing these methods of gain adjustment are presented. This comparing has done by defining new parameters for measuring quality of image based... 

This paper proposes a global motion estimation method to remove unintentional camera motions which degrade the visual quality of image sequences. The proposed approach is based on combination of 2D Radon transform, 1D Fourier transform and 1D Scale transform which can accurately estimate scale, rotational and translational distortions of camera motion and is robust to internal moving objects. Our experimental results with real and synthesized videos indicate the effectiveness of our proposed method  

Digital video stabilization is a category of techniques used to reduce the impact of unintentional camera motion such as jitter, jiggle, and other unsteady motions. These unintentional shakings degrade visual quality of videos and reduce the performance of subsequent processes such as video compression. Digital video stabilization which is performed by post processing the acquired frames, suffers from inaccuracy of motion estimation which is mostly due to the local motions of internal moving objects included in videos, and long processing time which prohibits them from being used in real time applications. In this paper we propose a fast and accurate transform based motion estimation method... 

In this letter, we propose a method for real-time high density impulse noise suppression from images. In our method, we first apply an impulse detector to identify the corrupted pixels and then employ an innovative weighted-average filter to restore them. The filter takes the nearest neighboring interpolated image as the initial image and computes the weights according to the relative positions of the corrupted and uncorrupted pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the best existing methods in both PSNR measure and visual quality and is quite suitable for real-time applications  

Low-complexity error concealment techniques for missing macroblock (MB) recovery based on the boundary matching principle are extensively studied and evaluated. In this paper, an improved boundary matching algorithm (BMA) using adaptive search is presented to conceal channel errors in inter-frames of video images. The proposed scheme adaptively selects proper candidate regions to conceal the artifact of a lost block. The candidate regions are examined based on analyzing motion activity of the neighboring MBs. Simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms both on PSNR and visual quality obviously of about 1-4dB compared to existing methods  

Noise interference and data loss are two major problems that affect the processing results of image data transmission and storage. Restoration of the lost information of an image based on the existing information is the essence of inpainting. In this paper a new algorithm based on Sample and Hold interpolation and Iteration is proposed for reconstructing damaged images from existing regions and is compared to some other methods. The experimental results show the superiority of the visual quality and PSNR performance of the proposed method. It is observed that this approach can efficiently fill in the holes with visually plausible information  

One of the most important parameters in evaluating a watermarking algorithm is its capacity. Of course capacity has a paradoxical relation with two other important parameters: image quality and robustness. Generally, watermarking capacity is expressed by bit per pixel (bpp) unit measure. This measure does not show what the side effects would be on image quality and capacity. Therefore, we proposed a two dimensional measure named capacity curve which shows the effects of capacity on visual quality. In this measure we can find the amount of degradation by a numerical value for each modification in pixels. Our experimental results are compatible with previous works in this field. © 2008... 

In this paper we propose a new method to recover images corrupted with salt and pepper noise. The proposed method uses ordered statistics filtering and soft-decisioning in successive approximations to find the locations and amplitudes of all the impulses. In our method we use soft-decision to generate a mask which is based on histogram distributions in local windows to distinguish impulsive noise from legitimate pixels. This mask is used to obtain an estimate of the original image by an iterative method. The result of the aforementioned algorithm can be fed back into the system to improve the image reconstruction process. This algorithm is analyzed and verified by simulation results.... 

One of the most important parameters in evaluating a watermarking algorithm is its capacity. In fact, capacity has a paradoxical relation with other two important parameters: image quality and robustness. Some works have been done on watermarking capacity and a few on image complexities. Most works on watermarking capacity is based on information theory and the capacity values which are calculated based on these methods are very tolerate. In this paper we propose a new method for calculating image complexity based on Region Of Interest (ROI) concept. After that we analyze three complexity measures named: Image compositional complexity (ICC), Quad tree and ROI method, with three different... 

Denoising of corrupted images has been a classical problem in image processing. In this paper we propose a new approach for image noise reduction using wavelet transform. In this method an improved version of thresholding neural networks (TNN) is used to find the optimum threshold values in the sense of minimum mean square error (MMSE). Based on these optimum thresholds a novel cycle-spinning based method is used to reduce image artifacts. In this method, we utilize two thresholding schemes as the thresholding operator of cycle-spinning. A neighbor dependent thresholding scheme is employed as its first shrinkage step and a simple wavelet thresholding with the optimum derived threshold values... 

H.264/AVC, the latest video coding standard, achieves better video compression rates since it supports new features such as a large number of intra- and inter-prediction candidate modes. H.264/AVC adopts rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique to obtain the best intra- and inter-prediction, while maximizing visual quality and minimizing the required bit rate. However, the RDO reduces the encoding speed via the exhaustive evaluation of all candidate modes. In this paper, we decrease the encoding time by reducing the computational complexity of the prediction function and the number of candidate modes. First, we improve Pan's method, by eliminating the DC mode from the candidates. Second,... 

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2021 challenge on perceptual image quality assessment (IQA), held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement workshop (NTIRE) workshop at CVPR 2021. As a new type of image processing technology, perceptual image processing algorithms based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have produced images with more realistic textures. These output images have completely different characteristics from traditional distortions, thus pose a new challenge for IQA methods to evaluate their visual quality. In comparison with previous IQA challenges, the training and testing datasets in this challenge include the outputs of perceptual image...