Conditional Covariances for the Signal Lag Measurements in Fluoroscopic Imaging

In fluoroscopic imaging, we can acquire X-ray image sequences using a flat-panel dynamic detector. However, lag signals from previous frames are added to the subsequently acquired images and produce lag artifacts. The lag signals also inflate the measured noise power spectrum (NPS) of a detector. In order to correct the measured NPS, the lag correction factor (LCF) is generally used. However, the nonuniform temporal gain (NTG), which is from inconsistent X-ray sources and readout circuits, can significantly distort the LCF measurements. In this paper, we propose a simple scheme to alleviate the NTG problem in order to accurately and efficiently measure the detector LCF. We first theoretically analyze the effects of NTG, especially on the correlation-based LCF measurement methods, where calculating the correlation coefficients are required. In order to remove the biases due to NTG, a notion of conditional covariance is considered for unbiased estimates of the correlation coefficients. Experiments using practical X-ray images acquired from a dynamic detector were conducted. The proposed approach could yield accurate LCF values similarly to the current approaches of the direct and U-L corrections with a low computational complexity. By calculating the correlation coefficients based on conditional covariance, we could obtain accurate LCF values even under the NTG environment. This approach does not require any preprocessing scheme of the direct or U-L correction and can provide further accurate LCF values than the method of IEC62220-1-3 does.

A Demodulation Algorithm for Periodically In-Plane Vibrating MEMS Based on a Stroboscopic Micro-Visual System

A high-frequency short-pulsed stroboscopic micro-visual system was employed to capture the transient image sequences of a periodically in-plane working micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) devices. To demodulate the motion parameters of the devices from the images, we developed the feature point matching (FPM) algorithm based on Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). A MEMS gyroscope, vibrating at a frequency of 8.189 kHz, was used as a testing sample to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Within the same processing time, the SURF-based FPM method demodulated the velocity of the in-plane motion with a precision of 10−5 pixels of the image, which was two orders of magnitude higher than the template-matching and frame-difference algorithms.

Automatic Registration of Mobile Mapping System Lidar Points and Panoramic-Image Sequences by Relative Orientation Model

To register mobile mapping system (MMS) lidar points and panoramic-image sequences, a relative orientation model of panoramic images (PROM) is proposed. The PROM is suitable for cases in which attitude or orientation parameters are unknown in the panoramic-image sequence. First, feature points are extracted and matched from panoramic-image pairs using the SURF algorithm. Second, these matched feature points are used to solve the relative attitude parameters in the PROM. Then, combining the PROM with the absolute position and attitude parameters of the initial panoramic image, the MMS lidar points and panoramic-image sequence are registered. Finally, the registration accuracy of the PROM method is assessed using corresponding points manually selected from the MMSlidar points and panoramic-image sequence. The results show that three types of MMSdata sources are registered accurately based on the proposed registration method. Our method transforms the registration of panoramic images and lidar points into image feature-point matching, which is suitable for diverse road scenes compared with existing methods.

Noise resistance territorial intensity-based optical flow using inverse confidential technique on bilateral function

This paper presents the use of the inverse confidential technique on bilateral function with the territorial intensity-based optical flow to prove the effectiveness in noise resistance environment. In general, the image’s motion vector is coded by the technique called optical flow where the sequences of the image are used to determine the motion vector. But, the accuracy rate of the motion vector is reduced when the source of image sequences is interfered by noises. This work proved that the inverse confidential technique on bilateral function can increase the percentage of accuracy in the motion vector determination by the territorial intensity-based optical flow under the noisy environment. We performed the testing with several kinds of non-Gaussian noises at several patterns of standard image sequences by analyzing the result of the motion vector in a form of the error vector magnitude (EVM) and compared it with several noise resistance techniques in territorial intensity-based optical flow method.

New Results on Small and Dim Infrared Target Detection

Real-time small infrared (IR) target detection is critical to the performance of the situational awareness system in high-altitude aircraft. However, current IR target detection systems are generally hardware-unfriendly and have difficulty in achieving a robust performance in datasets with clouds occupying a large proportion of the image background. In this paper, we present new results by using an efficient method that extracts the candidate targets in the pre-processing stage and fuses the local scale, blob-based contrast map and gradient map in the detection stage. We also developed mid-wave infrared (MWIR) and long-wave infrared (LWIR) cameras for data collection experiments and algorithm evaluations. Experimental results using both publicly available datasets and image sequences acquired by our cameras clearly demonstrated that the proposed method achieves high detection accuracy with the mean AUC being at least 22.3% higher than comparable methods, and the computational cost beating the other methods by a large margin.

Speckle noise suppression method using multi-azimuth SAR images.

Synthetic aperture radar images play an important role in military and civilian fields, but the presence of speckle noise has an impact on subsequent tasks such as target detection and target interpretation. With the development of multi-azimuth observation mode, the obtained multi-azimuth image sequences have high similarities. Therefore, combined with multi-azimuth image sequences, a novel method of SAR image speckle noise suppression based on clustering is proposed in this paper. In this method, multi-azimuth joint filtering framework based on two-level filtering is proposed, in which pre-filtering for single image and joint filtering based on Non-local Means algorithm for multi-azimuth image are used to suppress the noise. And k-means clustering is used to optimize the search area in the multi-azimuth joint filtering, so as to effectively suppress speckle noise while retaining structural details.

Computer Image Recognition and Recovery Method for Distorted Underwater Images by Structural Light

When imaging through water surface, the random fluctuation of sea surface will cause the distortion of the target scene image, so the distorted image needs to be corrected and reconstructed. At present, distortion compensation mainly adopts iterative registration strategy based on image sequences which is difficult to satisfy the real-time observation. This paper presents a correction method based on active imaging of structured light for underwater image. Experimental results show that compared with the traditional iterative algorithm, the proposed algorithm cannot only improve the restoration accuracy, but also greatly shorten the processing time. Experimental test results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has good recovery results.