Image compressed sensing based on multi-level adaptive learning dictionaries

Compressive sensing (CS) is widely being used in recent times for image compression and transmission. The major challenge in CS is perfect reconstruction of the original image from fewest samples with fast convergence. Dictionary learning and the wide-ranging optimization problem give rise to high computation complexity. Group sparse representation (GSR)-based approach is one of the fast and efficient methods of CS image recovery. However, it may tend to oversmoothen the recovered image. This research work focuses on enhancing the performance of GSR-based methods. In this research work, both local and non-local image patches are exploited in two phases of reconstruction. In the initialization phase, adaptive sparsifying l0 optimization model is utilized for local overlapping patches. Further, constrained GSR is applied on the outcome. The split Bregman iteration is harnessed to solve the resultant patch-group model. The execution time, PSNR and FSIM are employed as the evaluation parameters for evaluating the CS performance. The parametric performance is tested over a set of standard images. The experimental results show the competence of the proposed patch-group method over the existing ALSB, GSR and GSR-NCR (GSR with non-convex regularization) methods. The proposed model offers 1.3, 0.32 and 0.51 dB average PSNR gain over ALSB, GSR and GSR-NCR methods, respectively. The average execution time taken by the proposed work is 29% less than the traditional GSR method.

Sparse representations and compressive sampling approaches in engineering mechanics: A review of theoretical concepts and diverse applications

Breakthrough results in compressive sensing (CS) have shown that high dimensional signals (vectors) can often be accurately recovered from a relatively small number of non-adaptive linear projection observations, provided that they possess a sparse representation in some basis. Subsequent efforts have established that the reconstruction performance of CS can be improved by employing additional prior signal knowledge, such as dependency in the location of the non-zero signal coefficients (structured sparsity) or by collecting measurements sequentially and adaptively, in order to focus measurements into the proper subspace where the unknown signal resides. In this paper, we examine a powerful hybrid of adaptivity and structure. We identify a particular form of structured sparsity that is amenable to adaptive sensing, and using concepts from sparse hierarchical dictionary learning we demonstrate that sparsifying dictionaries exhibiting the appropriate form of structured sparsity can be learned from a collection of training data. The combination of these techniques (structured dictionary learning and adaptive sensing) results in an effective and efficient adaptive compressive acquisition approach which we refer to as LASeR (Learning Adaptive Sensing Representations).

Sparse coding allows the representation of complex data as a linear combination of basis sparse vectors (alternatively called atoms or codewords), a collection of which constitutes a dictionary. Dictionary learning is a learning process aimed at finding a small number of optimal basis vectors for a more accurate representation of the original data. The existing dictionary learning methods do not address the inherent uncertainty of the input data in their learning processes. To compensate for the uncertainty, and to obtain a flexible and effective learning system, we introduce a new adaptive fuzzy dictionary learning (AFDL) method for image classification purposes. The new method iteratively alternates between sparse coding based on a given dictionary and an adaptive fuzzy dictionary learning approach to learn (improve) dictionary atoms. The adjustability of the dictionary and coefficients vectors, in this method, provide us a more accurate and straight representation of input data. AFDL was applied on magnetic resonance images from the cancer image archive datasets, for medical image classification of cancer tumors. Finally, the overall experimental results clearly show that our approach outperforms its rival techniques in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Convergence speed in the experimental results shows that AFDL can achieve its acceptable precision in a reasonable time.

The importance of sparse signal structures has been recognized in a plethora of applications ranging from medical imaging to group disease testing to radar technology. It has been shown in practice that various signals of interest may be (approximately) sparsely modeled, and that sparse modeling is often beneficial, or even indispensable to signal recovery. Alongside an increase in applications, a rich theory of sparse and compressible signal recovery has recently been developed under the names compressed sensing (CS) and sparse approximation (SA). This revolutionary research has demonstrated that many signals can be recovered from severely undersampled measurements by taking advantage of their inherent low-dimensional structure. More recently, an offshoot of CS and SA has been a focus of research on other low-dimensional signal structures such as matrices of low rank. Low-rank matrix recovery (LRMR) is demonstrating a rapidly growing array of important applications such as quantum state tomography, triangulation from incomplete distance measurements, recommender systems (e.g., the Netflix problem), and system identification and control. In this dissertation, we examine CS, SA, and LRMR from a theoretical perspective. We consider a variety of different measurement and signal models, both random and deterministic, and mainly ask two questions. How many measurements are necessary? How large is the recovery error? We give theoretical lower bounds for both of these questions, including oracle and minimax lower bounds for the error. However, the main emphasis of the thesis is to demonstrate the efficacy of convex optimization---in particular l1 and nuclear-norm minimization based programs---in CS, SA, and LRMR. We derive upper bounds for the number of measurements required and the error derived by convex optimization, which in many cases match the lower bounds up to constant or logarithmic factors. The majority of these results do not require the restricted isometry property (RIP), a ubiquitous condition in the literature.

In this paper, we address the problem of green Compressed Sensing (CS) reconstruction within Internet of Things (IoT) networks, both in terms of computing architecture and reconstruction algorithms. The approach is novel since, unlike most of the literature dealing with energy efficient gathering of the CS measurements, we focus on the energy efficiency of the signal reconstruction stage given the CS measurements. As a first novel contribution, we present an analysis of the energy consumption within the IoT network under two computing architectures. In the first one, reconstruction takes place within the IoT network and the reconstructed data are encoded and transmitted out of the IoT network; in the second one, all the CS measurements are forwarded to off-network devices for reconstruction and storage, i.e., reconstruction is off-loaded. Our analysis shows that the two architectures significantly differ in terms of consumed energy, and it outlines a theoretically motivated criterion to select a green CS reconstruction computing architecture. Specifically, we present a suitable decision function to determine which architecture outperforms the other in terms of energy efficiency. The presented decision function depends on a few IoT network features, such as the network size, the sink connectivity, and other systems’ parameters. As a second novel contribution, we show how to overcome classical performance comparison of different CS reconstruction algorithms usually carried out w.r.t. the achieved accuracy. Specifically, we consider the consumed energy and analyze the energy vs. accuracy trade-off. The herein presented approach, jointly considering signal processing and IoT network issues, is a relevant contribution for designing green compressive sampling architectures in IoT networks.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are corrupted by speckle noise due to random interference of electromagnetic waves. In this paper, we proposed a speckle reduction technique based on sparse representation and dictionary learning. Firstly, an adaptive dictionary was learned by performing KSVD algorithm through a large amount of training patches extracted from the noisy SAR image. Considering the inaccurate recovery of point targets which is brought by the inadequate number of training samples, we employed a point target enhancing scheme to highlight the important point targets in the SAR image. Some experiments were conducted on real SAR images, and the results shows that our proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the speckle noise as well as preserve details. Some comparisons are made to prove its superiority to the available algorithms.

The compressive sensing (CS) framework states that a signal that has a sparse representation in a known basis may be reconstructed from samples obtained at a sub-Nyquist sampling rate. The Fourier domain is widely used in CS applications due to its inherent properties. Sparse signal recovery applications using a small number of Fourier transform coefficients have made solutions to large-scale data recovery problems, including image recovery problems, more practical. The sparse reconstruction of 2D images is performed using the sampling patterns generated by taking the general frequency characteristics of the images into account. In this work, instead of forming a general sampling pattern for infrared (IR) images, a special sampling pattern is obtained by gathering a database to extract the frequency characteristics of IR sea-surveillance images. Experimental results show that the proposed sampling pattern provides better sparse recovery results compared to the widely used patterns proposed in the literature. It is also shown that, together with a certain image dataset, the sampling pattern generated by the proposed scheme can be generalized for various image sparse recovery applications.

Dictionary learning with the cosparse analysis model based on summation of blocked determinants as the sparseness measure

In compressive sensing (CS), a challenge is to find a space in which the signal is sparse and, hence, faithfully recoverable. Since many natural signals such as images have locally varying statistics, the sparse space varies in time/spatial domain. As such, CS recovery should be conducted in locally adaptive signal-dependent spaces to counter the fact that the CS measurements are global and irrespective of signal structures. On the contrary, existing CS reconstruction methods use a fixed set of bases (e.g., wavelets, DCT, and gradient spaces) for the entirety of a signal. To rectify this problem, we propose a new framework for model-guided adaptive recovery of compressive sensing (MARX) and show how a 2-D piecewise autoregressive model can be integrated into the MARX framework to make CS recovery adaptive to spatially varying second order statistics of an image. In addition, MARX offers a mechanism of characterizing and exploiting structured sparsities of natural images, greatly restricting the CS solution space. Simulation results over a wide range of natural images show that the proposed MARX technique can improve the reconstruction quality of existing CS methods by 2-7 dB.

Compressed sensing (CS) has gained much interests in the speech processing community and especially in compression. The success of this appealing paradigm relies, heavily, on the sparsity of speech signals in a given dictionary. Thanks to machine learning, it is possible to go beyond the limits of analytical dictionaries by designing learned dictionaries, which are more able to fit the nature of data. In this paper, we propose speech compression scheme based on CS using K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) algorithm to learn a dictionary for sparse representation and iteratively reweighted least square (IRLS) algorithm for signal reconstruction from randomly generated measurements. Different sizes of dictionaries are trained and compared with discrete cosine transform (DCT). Signal quality results, measured with perceptual evaluation speech quality (PESQ) revealed that learned dictionary using K-SVD improves the performance of speech compressed sensing comparing to DCT.

Group-based sparse representation for image compressive sensing reconstruction with non-convex regularization

This paper presents modification of the TwIST algorithm for Compressive Sensing MRI images reconstruction. Compressive Sensing is new approach in signal processing whose basic idea is recovering signal form small set of available samples. The application of the Compressive Sensing in biomedical imaging has found great importance. It allows significant lowering of the acquisition time, and therefore, save the patient from the negative impact of the MR apparatus. TwIST is commonly used algorithm for 2D signals reconstruction using Compressive Sensing principle. It is based on the Total Variation minimization. Standard version of the TwIST uses masked 2D Discrete Fourier Transform coefficients as Compressive Sensing measurements. In this paper, different masks and different transformation domains for coefficients selection are tested. Certain percent of the measurements is used from the mask, as well as small number of coefficients outside the mask. Comparative analysis using 2D DFT and 2D DCT coefficients, with different mask shapes is performed. The theory is proved with experimental results.

As a dual-modal imaging technology that has emerged in recent years, cone-beam X-ray luminescence computed tomography (CB-XLCT) has exhibited promise as a tool for the early three-dimensional detection of tumors in small animals. However, due to the challenges imposed by the low absorption and high scattering of light in tissues, the CB-XLCT reconstruction problem is a severely ill-conditioned inverse problem, rendering it difficult to obtain satisfactory reconstruction results. In this study, a strategy that utilizes dictionary learning and group structure (DLGS) is proposed to achieve satisfactory CB-XLCT reconstruction performance. The group structure is employed to account for the clustering of nanophosphors in specific regions within the organism, which can enhance the interrelation of elements in the same group. Furthermore, the dictionary learning strategy is implemented to effectively capture sparse features. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated through numerical simulations and in vivo experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior reconstruction performance in terms of location accuracy, target shape, robustness, dual-source resolution, and in vivo practicability.

Automatic prostate segmentation from MR images is an important task in various clinical applications such as prostate cancer staging and MR-guided radiotherapy planning. However, the large appearance and shape variations of the prostate in MR images make the segmentation problem difficult to solve. Traditional Active Shape/Appearance Model (ASM/AAM) has limited accuracy on this problem, since its basic assumption, i.e., both shape and appearance of the targeted organ follow Gaussian distributions, is invalid in prostate MR images. To this end, the authors propose a sparse dictionary learning method to model the image appearance in a nonparametric fashion and further integrate the appearance model into a deformable segmentation framework for prostate MR segmentation. To drive the deformable model for prostate segmentation, the authors propose nonparametric appearance and shape models. The nonparametric appearance model is based on a novel dictionary learning method, namely distributed discriminative dictionary (DDD) learning, which is able to capture fine distinctions in image appearance. To increase the differential power of traditional dictionary-based classification methods, the authors' DDD learning approach takes three strategies. First, two dictionaries for prostate and nonprostate tissues are built, respectively, using the discriminative features obtained from minimum redundancy maximum relevance feature selection. Second, linear discriminant analysis is employed as a linear classifier to boost the optimal separation between prostate and nonprostate tissues, based on the representation residuals from sparse representation. Third, to enhance the robustness of the authors' classification method, multiple local dictionaries are learned for local regions along the prostate boundary (each with small appearance variations), instead of learning one global classifier for the entire prostate. These discriminative dictionaries are located on different patches of the prostate surface and trained to adaptively capture the appearance in different prostate zones, thus achieving better local tissue differentiation. For each local region, multiple classifiers are trained based on the randomly selected samples and finally assembled by a specific fusion method. In addition to this nonparametric appearance model, a prostate shape model is learned from the shape statistics using a novel approach, sparse shape composition, which can model nonGaussian distributions of shape variation and regularize the 3D mesh deformation by constraining it within the observed shape subspace. The proposed method has been evaluated on two datasets consisting of T2-weighted MR prostate images. For the first (internal) dataset, the classification effectiveness of the authors' improved dictionary learning has been validated by comparing it with three other variants of traditional dictionary learning methods. The experimental results show that the authors' method yields a Dice Ratio of 89.1% compared to the manual segmentation, which is more accurate than the three state-of-the-art MR prostate segmentation methods under comparison. For the second dataset, the MICCAI 2012 challenge dataset, the authors' proposed method yields a Dice Ratio of 87.4%, which also achieves better segmentation accuracy than other methods under comparison. A new magnetic resonance image prostate segmentation method is proposed based on the combination of deformable model and dictionary learning methods, which achieves more accurate segmentation performance on prostate T2 MR images.