Complex Magnetic Anomaly Detection Using Structured Low-Rank Approximation With Total Variation Regularization

Efficient general sparse denoising with non-convex sparse constraint and total variation regularization

We introduce a total variation (TV) regularization model for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image despeckling. A dual-formulation-based adaptive TV (ATV) regularization method is applied to solve the TV regularization. The parameter adaptation of the TV regularization is performed based on the noise level estimated via wavelets. The TV-regularization-based image restoration model has a good performance in preserving image sharpness and edges while removing noises, and it is therefore effective for edge preserve SAR image despeckling. Experiments have been carried out using optical images contaminated with artificial speckles first and then SAR images. A despeckling evaluation index (DEI) is designed to assess the effectiveness of edge preserve despeckling on SAR images, which is based on the ratio of the standard deviations of two neighborhood areas of different sizes of a pixel. Experimental results show that the proposed ATV method can effectively suppress SAR image speckles without compromising the edge sharpness of image features according to both subjective visual assessment of image quality and objective evaluation using DEI.

Magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) has been widely used for detecting the magnetic targets in many areas. In low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) situations, the magnetic anomaly is usually buried in the magnetic noise, which leads to a decrease in the detection performance of traditional MAD methods. In order to improve the detection probability of MAD in low SNR, we propose an adaptive method of MAD using support vector machine (SVM). First, we design a detection model using SVM with radial basis function (RBF) kernel function. Meanwhile, we analyze the magnetic anomaly signal and determined the orthonormal basis function (OBF) energy and magnetic entropy as the features of the magnetic anomaly, which are as the input of the model. Then, the model is trained based on the data set with the magnetic signals. Finally, the trained model is applied to the raw magnetic signal to detect the anomaly. Compared to the traditional methods, the proposed method has a better performance and adaptive ability. The proposed method is validated by the real magnetic noise. The results show that the proposed method can reduce the case of false alarm and improve the detection performance in low SNR.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction model based on total variation (TV) regularization can deal with problems such as incomplete reconstruction, blurred boundary, and residual noise. In this article, a non‐convex isotropic TV regularization reconstruction model is proposed to overcome the drawback. Moreau envelope and minmax‐concave penalty are firstly used to construct the non‐convex regularization of L2 norm, then it is applied into the TV regularization to construct the sparse reconstruction model. The proposed model can extract the edge contour of the target effectively since it can avoid the underestimation of larger nonzero elements in convex regularization. In addition, the global convexity of the cost function can be guaranteed under certain conditions. Then, an efficient algorithm such as alternating direction method of multipliers is proposed to solve the new cost function. Experimental results show that, compared with several typical image reconstruction methods, the proposed model performs better. Both the relative error and the peak signal‐to‐noise ratio are significantly improved, and the reconstructed images also show better visual effects. The competitive experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is not limited to MRI reconstruction, but it is general enough to be used in other fields with natural images.

The use of non-local self-similarity prior between image blocks can improve image reconstruction performance significantly. We propose a compressive sensing image reconstruction algorithm that combines bilateral total variation and nonlocal low-rank regularization to overcome over-smoothing and degradation of edge information which result from the prior reconstructed image. The proposed algorithm makes use of the preservation of image edge information by bilateral total variation operator to enhance the edge details of the reconstructed image. In addition, we use weighted nuclear norm regularization as a low-rank constraint for similar blocks of the image. To solve this convex optimization problem, the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is employed to optimize and iterate the algorithm model effectively. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain better image reconstruction quality than conventional algorithms with using total variation regularization or considering the nonlocal structure of the image only. At 10% sampling rate, the peak signal-to-noise ratio gain is up to 2.39 dB in noiseless measurements compared with Nonlocal Low-rank Regularization (NLR-CS). Reconstructed image comparison shows that the proposed algorithm retains more high frequency components. In noisy measurements, the proposed algorithm is robust to noise and the reconstructed image retains more detail information.

In this paper, we propose a variational model for Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data speckle reduction. Since the statistical characteristic of covariance matrix can be well described by the complex Wishart distribution, a data fitting term can be derived according to the maximum likelihood rule. Combining it with the total variation (TV) regularization gives a variational model for PolSAR image speckle reduction. An algorithm based on the alternating minimization technique is used to solve the variational problem. Experimental results on real PolSAR images demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.

It is required that input features are represented as vectors or scalars in machine learning for classification, e.g. support vector machine (SVM). However, real world data such as 2D images is naturally represented as matrices or tensors with higher dimensions. Thus, structural information of the data whose dimensions are more than two is not successfully considered. One typical structural information which is useful for the classification task is the spatial relationship of the nearby data points. In this paper, to leverage this kind of structural information, we propose a novel classification method which combines total variational (TV) regularization with SVM, called TV-SVM. Since TV achieves a local smoothing property by penalizing the local discontinuity of data, TV-SVM preserves better local structure than the original SVM due to TV regularization. We solve the objective function of TV-SVM via the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Experimental results on image classification show that TV-SVM is competitive to the state-of-the-art learning method in both classification accuracy and computational complexity.

Regularization plays a crucial role in reliably utilizing imaging systems for scientific and medical investigations. It helps to stabilize the process of computationally undoing any degradation caused by physical limitations of the imaging process. In the past decades, total variation regularization played a dominant role in the literature. Two forms of total variation regularizations, namely the first-order and the second-order total variation (TV-1 and TV-2) have been widely used. TV-1 has a disadvantage: it reconstructs images in the form of piece-wise constants when the noise and/or under-sampling is severe, while TV-2 reconstructs natural-looking images under such scenarios. On the other hand, TV-1 can recover sharp jumps better than TV-2. Two forms of generalizations, namely Hessian-Schatten norm (HSN) regularization, and total generalized variation (TGV) regularization, have been proposed and have become significant developments in the area of regularization for imaging inverse problems owing to their performance. While the strength of TGV is that it can combine the advantages of TV-1 and TV-2, HSN has better structure-preserving property. Here, we develop a novel regularization for image recovery that combines the strengths of TGV and HSN. We achieve this by restricting the maximization space in the dual form of HSN in the same way that TGV is obtained from TV-2. We call the new regularization the generalized Hessian-Schatten norm regularization (GHSN). We develop a novel computational method for image reconstruction using the new form of regularization based on the well-known framework called the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We demonstrate the strength of the GHSN using some reconstruction examples.

Spectral unmixing aims at identifying the pure spectral signatures in hyperspectral images and simultaneously estimating their proportions in each pixel of the scene. By using an available spectral library as a dictionary, sparse-regression-based approaches aim at finding a subset of the dictionary that can optimally model each pixel in a given hyperspectral image. regularizer has been widely considered as a regularization strategy to exploit the sparsity of the unmixing solution. Further sparsity can be imposed by also using weighting factors. However, most existing strategies focus on the unmixing solution ignoring the gradient information. To account for the gradient information in hyperspectral unmixing, we propose a weighted sparse regression with total variation (WSRTV) unmixing model. The proposed WSRTV model incorporates gradient information in the sparse regression formulation by means of the weighted total variation (WTV) regularizer. The model imposes sparsity on both the solution and the gradient to improve the performance of unmixing. A dual symmetric Gauss-Seidel alternating direction method of multipliers (sGSADMM) is designed to optimize the proposed model. The designed algorithm both handles the anisotropic and isotropic WTV. Simulated and real hyperspectral data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

A common way for solving the denosing problem is to utilize the total variation (TV) regularization. Many efficient numerical algorithms have been developed for solving the TV regularization problem. Condat described a fast direct algorithm to compute the processed 1D signal. Also there exists a direct algorithm with a linear time for 1D TV denoising referred to as the taut string algorithm. The Condat’s algorithm is based on a dual problem to the 1D TV regularization. In this paper, we propose a variant of the Condat’s algorithm based on the direct 1D TV regularization problem. The usage of the Condat’s algorithm with the taut string approach leads to a clear geometric description of the extremal function. Computer simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm for restoration of degraded signals.

Image denoising by means of total variation (TV) regularization is still a standard procedure. For very large images, especially three-dimensional voxel datasets, however, this can be computationally infeasible. We show how this TV regularization can be approximately performed even in arbitrary dimensions by applying appropriate shrinkage to selected and properly weighted Haar wavelet coefficients, all of which depends even on the dimensionality of the data. Our approach acts entirely on the wavelet coefficients which represent the compressed image, and is therefore suited for the application on large three-dimensional images represented in the Haar wavelet basis, e.g., volumes from computed tomography.

Magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) is widely applied in the fields of resource exploration, hidden target detection, and explosive ordnance disposal. Traditional methods, such as orthonormal basis functions (OBFs), are proposed to extract anomaly signals from ambient noises and device noises. Due to the weakness of the signal, the detection probability has always been limited by a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To surmount the limitation, a full connected neural network (FCN) with OBF features is trained to do the detection. Nonetheless, its effect is not reliable enough under a low SNR, and it is sensitive to the orientations. This letter introduces a multifeature fusion-based neural network with three subclassifiers to conduct MAD. The first subclassifier uses the time–frequency feature, the second uses the statistical feature, and the last concentrates on the magnetic moment feature. The outputs of the subclassifiers are analyzed synthetically by weighted voting, and the optimized weights are picked on the basis of individual performance. The real noise is recorded by experiments to test the performance of our network. The result indicates that a multifeature-based neural network shows a higher detection probability than the ordinary FCN by 5% medially. At very low SNR, the multifeature-based neural network can achieve a detection probability 13% higher than FCN. Sensitivity to orientations is also improved by the multifeature-based neural network.

Multi-energy computed tomography (MECT) based on a photon-counting detector is an emerging imaging modality that collects projections at several energy bins with a single scan. However, the limited number of photons collected into the divided, narrow energy bins results in high quantum noise levels in reconstructed images. This study aims to improve MECT image quality by minimizing noise levels while retaining image details. A novel MECT reconstruction method was proposed by exploiting the nonlocal tensor similarity among interchannel images and spatial sparsity in single-channel images. Similar patches were initially extracted from the interchannel images in spectral and spatial domains, then stacked into a new three-order tensor. Intrinsic tensor sparsity regularization that combined the Tuker and canonical polyadic (CP) low-rank decomposition techniques were applied to exploit the nonlocal similarity of the formulated tensor. Spatial sparsity in single-channel images was modeled by total variation (TV) regularization that utilizes the compressibility of gradient image. A new MECT reconstruction model was established by simultaneously incorporating the intrinsic tensor sparsity and TV regularizations. The iterative alternating minimization method was utilized to solve the reconstruction model based on a flexible framework. The proposed method was applied to the digital phantom and real mouse data to assess its feasibility and reliability. The reconstruction and decomposition results in the mouse data were encouraging and demonstrated the ability of the proposed method in noise suppression while preserving image details, not observed with other methods. Imaging data from the digital phantom illustrated this method as achieving the best intuitive reconstruction and decomposition results among all compared methods. They reduced the root mean square error (RMSE) by 89.75%, 50.75%, and 36.54% on the reconstructed images compared with analytic, TV-based, and tensor-based methods, respectively. This phenomenon was also observed with decomposition results, where the RMSE was also reduced by 97.96%, 67.74%, 72.05%, respectively. In this study, we proposed a reconstruction method for photon counting detector-based MECT, using the intrinsic tensor sparsity and TV regularizations. Improvements in noise suppression and detail preservation in the digital phantom and real mouse data were validated by the qualitative and quantitative evaluations on the reconstruction and decomposition results, verifying the potential of the proposed method in MECT reconstruction.

Application of Regularized Richardson-Lucy Algorithm for Deconvolution of Confocal Microscopy Images

To solve the ill-posed problem in electrical impedance tomography (EIT) and overcome the blur effect made by conventional L2 Tikhonov regularization, a new two-step iterative regularization algorithm is applied for the process reconstruction of lung respiration. This algorithm is based on total variation (TV) regularization method, and uses a two-step iterative method with TV denoising operator, so that it can achieve double regularization effect. This algorithm has advantages in both resolution and robustness. Both simulation and experiment results are executed to prove the effectiveness of TV regularization method.