Information and estimation in image processing

Author(s):  
B. Roy Frieden

Despite the skill and determination of electro-optical system designers, the images acquired using their best designs often suffer from blur and noise. The aim of an “image enhancer” such as myself is to improve these poor images, usually by digital means, such that they better resemble the true, “optical object,” input to the system. This problem is notoriously “ill-posed,” i.e. any direct approach at inversion of the image data suffers strongly from the presence of even a small amount of noise in the data. In fact, the fluctuations engendered in neighboring output values tend to be strongly negative-correlated, so that the output spatially oscillates up and down, with large amplitude, about the true object. What can be done about this situation? As we shall see, various concepts taken from statistical communication theory have proven to be of real use in attacking this problem. We offer below a brief summary of these concepts.

Author(s):  
Klaus-Ruediger Peters

Differential hysteresis processing is a new image processing technology that provides a tool for the display of image data information at any level of differential contrast resolution. This includes the maximum contrast resolution of the acquisition system which may be 1,000-times higher than that of the visual system (16 bit versus 6 bit). All microscopes acquire high precision contrasts at a level of <0.01-25% of the acquisition range in 16-bit - 8-bit data, but these contrasts are mostly invisible or only partially visible even in conventionally enhanced images. The processing principle of the differential hysteresis tool is based on hysteresis properties of intensity variations within an image.Differential hysteresis image processing moves a cursor of selected intensity range (hysteresis range) along lines through the image data reading each successive pixel intensity. The midpoint of the cursor provides the output data. If the intensity value of the following pixel falls outside of the actual cursor endpoint values, then the cursor follows the data either with its top or with its bottom, but if the pixels' intensity value falls within the cursor range, then the cursor maintains its intensity value.


Author(s):  
Stuart McKernan

For many years the concept of quantitative diffraction contrast experiments might have consisted of the determination of dislocation Burgers vectors using a g.b = 0 criterion from several different 2-beam images. Since the advent of the personal computer revolution, the available computing power for performing image-processing and image-simulation calculations is enormous and ubiquitous. Several programs now exist to perform simulations of diffraction contrast images using various approximations. The most common approximations are the use of only 2-beams or a single systematic row to calculate the image contrast, or calculating the image using a column approximation. The increasing amount of literature showing comparisons of experimental and simulated images shows that it is possible to obtain very close agreement between the two images; although the choice of parameters used, and the assumptions made, in performing the calculation must be properly dealt with. The simulation of the images of defects in materials has, in many cases, therefore become a tractable problem.


Author(s):  
Fumio Watari ◽  
J. M. Cowley

STEM coupled with the optical system was used for the investigation of the early oxidation on the surface of Cr. Cr thin films (30 – 1000Å) were prepared by evaporation onto the polished or air-cleaved NaCl substrates at room temperature and 45°C in a vacuum of 10−6 Torr with an evaporation speed 0.3Å/sec. Rather thick specimens (200 – 1000Å) with various preferred orientations were used for the investigation of the oxidation at moderately high temperature (600 − 1100°C). Selected area diffraction patterns in these specimens are usually very much complicated by the existence of the different kinds of oxides and their multiple twinning. The determination of the epitaxial orientation relationship of the oxides formed on the Cr surface was made possible by intensive use of the optical system and microdiffraction techniques. Prior to the formation of the known rhombohedral Cr2O3, a thin spinel oxide, probably analogous to γ -Al203 or γ -Fe203, was formed. Fig. 1a shows the distinct epitaxial growth of the spinel (001) as well as the rhombohedral (125) on the well-oriented Cr(001) surface. In the case of the Cr specimen with the (001) preferred orientation (Fig. 1b), the rings explainable by spinel structure appeared as well as the well defined epitaxial spots of the spinel (001). The microdif fraction from 20A areas (Fig. 2a) clearly shows the same pattern as Fig. Ia with the weaker oxide spots among the more intense Cr spots, indicating that the thickness of the oxide is much less than that of Cr. The rhombohedral Cr2O3 was nucleated preferably at the Cr(011) sites provided by the polycrystalline nature of the present specimens with the relation Cr2O3 (001)//Cr(011), and by further oxidation it grew into full coverage of the rest of the Cr surface with the orientation determined by the initial nucleation.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (7) ◽  
pp. 816
Author(s):  
Pingping Liu ◽  
Xiaokang Yang ◽  
Baixin Jin ◽  
Qiuzhan Zhou

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common complication of diabetes mellitus (DM), and it is necessary to diagnose DR in the early stages of treatment. With the rapid development of convolutional neural networks in the field of image processing, deep learning methods have achieved great success in the field of medical image processing. Various medical lesion detection systems have been proposed to detect fundus lesions. At present, in the image classification process of diabetic retinopathy, the fine-grained properties of the diseased image are ignored and most of the retinopathy image data sets have serious uneven distribution problems, which limits the ability of the network to predict the classification of lesions to a large extent. We propose a new non-homologous bilinear pooling convolutional neural network model and combine it with the attention mechanism to further improve the network’s ability to extract specific features of the image. The experimental results show that, compared with the most popular fundus image classification models, the network model we proposed can greatly improve the prediction accuracy of the network while maintaining computational efficiency.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Jens Elias Waibel ◽  
Sayedali Shetab Boushehri ◽  
Carsten Marr

Abstract Background Deep learning contributes to uncovering molecular and cellular processes with highly performant algorithms. Convolutional neural networks have become the state-of-the-art tool to provide accurate and fast image data processing. However, published algorithms mostly solve only one specific problem and they typically require a considerable coding effort and machine learning background for their application. Results We have thus developed InstantDL, a deep learning pipeline for four common image processing tasks: semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, pixel-wise regression and classification. InstantDL enables researchers with a basic computational background to apply debugged and benchmarked state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to their own data with minimal effort. To make the pipeline robust, we have automated and standardized workflows and extensively tested it in different scenarios. Moreover, it allows assessing the uncertainty of predictions. We have benchmarked InstantDL on seven publicly available datasets achieving competitive performance without any parameter tuning. For customization of the pipeline to specific tasks, all code is easily accessible and well documented. Conclusions With InstantDL, we hope to empower biomedical researchers to conduct reproducible image processing with a convenient and easy-to-use pipeline.


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