Multispectral Image Enhancement Based on the Dark Channel Prior and Bilateral Fractional Differential Model

Compared with single-band remote sensing images, multispectral images can obtain information on the same target in different bands. By combining the characteristics of each band, we can obtain clearer enhanced images; therefore, we propose a multispectral image enhancement method based on the improved dark channel prior (IDCP) and bilateral fractional differential (BFD) model to make full use of the multiband information. First, the original multispectral image is inverted to meet the prior conditions of dark channel theory. Second, according to the characteristics of multiple bands, the dark channel algorithm is improved. The RGB channels are extended to multiple channels, and the spatial domain fractional differential mask is used to optimize the transmittance estimation to make it more consistent with the dark channel hypothesis. Then, we propose a bilateral fractional differentiation algorithm that enhances the edge details of an image through the fractional differential in the spatial domain and intensity domain. Finally, we implement the inversion operation to obtain the final enhanced image. We apply the proposed IDCP_BFD method to a multispectral dataset and conduct sufficient experiments. The experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method over relative comparison methods.

An Ensembled Spatial Enhancement Method for Image Enhancement in Healthcare

Most medical images are low in contrast because adequate details that may prove vital decisions are not visible to the naked eye. Also, due to the low-contrast nature of the image, it is not easily segmented because there is no significant change between the pixel values, which makes the gradient very small Hence, the contour cannot converge on the edges of the object. In this work, we have proposed an ensembled spatial method for image enhancement. In this ensembled approach, we first employed the Laplacian filter, which highlights the areas of fast intensity variation. This filter can determine the sufficient details of an image. The Laplacian filter will also improve those features having shrill disjointedness. Then, the gradient of the image has been determined, which utilizes the surrounding pixels for the weighted convolution operation for noise diminishing. However, in the gradient filter, there is one negative integer in the weighting. The intensity value of the middle pixel might be deducted from the surrounding pixels, to enlarge the difference between the head-to-head pixels for calculating the gradients. This is one of the reasons due to which the gradient filter is not entirely optimistic, which may be calculated in eight directions. Therefore, the averaging filter has been utilized, which is an effective filter for image enhancement. This approach does not rely on the values that are completely diverse from distinctive values in the surrounding due to which it recollects the details of the image. The proposed approach significantly showed the best performance on various images collected in dynamic environments.

Speech recognition with a hearing-aid processing scheme combining beamforming with mask-informed speech enhancement

A signal processing approach combining beamforming with mask-informed speech enhancement was assessed by measuring sentence recognition in listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing impairment in adverse listening conditions that simulated the output of behind-the-ear hearing aids in a noisy classroom. Two types of beamforming were compared: binaural, with the two microphones of each aid treated as a single array, and bilateral, where independent left and right beamformers were derived. Binaural beamforming produces a narrower beam, maximising improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), but eliminates the spatial diversity that is preserved in bilateral beamforming. Each beamformer type was optimised for the true target position and implemented with and without additional speech enhancement in which spectral features extracted from the beamformer output were passed to a deep neural network trained to identify time-frequency regions dominated by target speech. Additional conditions comprising binaural beamforming combined with speech enhancement implemented using Wiener filtering or modulation-domain Kalman filtering were tested in normally-hearing (NH) listeners. Both beamformer types gave substantial improvements relative to no processing, with significantly greater benefit for binaural beamforming. Performance with additional mask-informed enhancement was poorer than with beamforming alone, for both beamformer types and both listener groups. In NH listeners the addition of mask-informed enhancement produced significantly poorer performance than both other forms of enhancement, neither of which differed from the beamformer alone. In summary, the additional improvement in SNR provided by binaural beamforming appeared to outweigh loss of spatial information, while speech understanding was not further improved by the mask-informed enhancement method implemented here.