Kunal N. Chaudhury

Kunal N. Chaudhury, Yuehaw Khoo, Amit Singer

In this paper, we describe an algorithm for sensor network localization (SNL) that proceeds by dividing the whole network into smaller subnetworks, then localizes them in parallel using some fast and accurate algorithm, and finally registers the localized subnetworks in a global coordinate system. We demonstrate that this divide-and-conquer algorithm can be used to leverage existing high-precision SNL algorithms to large-scale networks, which could otherwise only be applied to small-to-medium sized networks. The main contribution of this paper concerns the final registration phase. In particular, we consider a least-squares formulation of the registration problem (both with and without anchor constraints) and demonstrate how this otherwise non-convex problem can be relaxed into a tractable convex program. We provide some preliminary simulation results for large-scale SNL demonstrating that the proposed registration algorithm (together with an accurate localization scheme) offers a good tradeoff between run time and accuracy.

Chirayu D. Athalye, Kunal N. Chaudhury, Bhartendu Kumar

In plug-and-play (PnP) regularization, the proximal operator in algorithms such as ISTA and ADMM is replaced by a powerful denoiser. This formal substitution works surprisingly well in practice. In fact, PnP has been shown to give state-of-the-art results for various imaging applications. The empirical success of PnP has motivated researchers to understand its theoretical underpinnings and, in particular, its convergence. It was shown in prior work that for kernel denoisers such as the nonlocal means, PnP-ISTA provably converges under some strong assumptions on the forward model. The present work is motivated by the following questions: Can we relax the assumptions on the forward model? Can the convergence analysis be extended to PnP-ADMM? Can we estimate the convergence rate? In this letter, we resolve these questions using the contraction mapping theorem: (i) for symmetric denoisers, we show that (under mild conditions) PnP-ISTA and PnP-ADMM exhibit linear convergence; and (ii) for kernel denoisers, we show that PnP-ISTA and PnP-ADMM converge linearly for image inpainting. We validate our theoretical findings using reconstruction experiments.

Pravin Nair, Ruturaj G. Gavaskar, Kunal N. Chaudhury

A standard model for image reconstruction involves the minimization of a data-fidelity term along with a regularizer, where the optimization is performed using proximal algorithms such as ISTA and ADMM. In plug-and-play (PnP) regularization, the proximal operator (associated with the regularizer) in ISTA and ADMM is replaced by a powerful image denoiser. Although PnP regularization works surprisingly well in practice, its theoretical convergence -- whether convergence of the PnP iterates is guaranteed and if they minimize some objective function -- is not completely understood even for simple linear denoisers such as nonlocal means. In particular, while there are works where either iterate or objective convergence is established separately, a simultaneous guarantee on iterate and objective convergence is not available for any denoiser to our knowledge. In this paper, we establish both forms of convergence for a special class of linear denoisers. Notably, unlike existing works where the focus is on symmetric denoisers, our analysis covers non-symmetric denoisers such as nonlocal means and almost any convex data-fidelity. The novelty in this regard is that we make use of the convergence theory of averaged operators and we work with a special inner product (and norm) derived from the linear denoiser; the latter requires us to appropriately define the gradient and proximal operators associated with the data-fidelity term. We validate our convergence results using image reconstruction experiments.

Ruturaj G. Gavaskar, Kunal N. Chaudhury

Plug-and-play (PnP) method is a recent paradigm for image regularization, where the proximal operator (associated with some given regularizer) in an iterative algorithm is replaced with a powerful denoiser. Algorithmically, this involves repeated inversion (of the forward model) and denoising until convergence. Remarkably, PnP regularization produces promising results for several restoration applications. However, a fundamental question in this regard is the theoretical convergence of the PnP iterations, since the algorithm is not strictly derived from an optimization framework. This question has been investigated in recent works, but there are still many unresolved problems. For example, it is not known if convergence can be guaranteed if we use generic kernel denoisers (e.g. nonlocal means) within the ISTA framework (PnP-ISTA). We prove that, under reasonable assumptions, fixed-point convergence of PnP-ISTA is indeed guaranteed for linear inverse problems such as deblurring, inpainting and superresolution (the assumptions are verifiable for inpainting). We compare our theoretical findings with existing results, validate them numerically, and explain their practical relevance.

Ruturaj G. Gavaskar, Kunal N. Chaudhury

In most state-of-the-art image restoration methods, the sum of a data-fidelity and a regularization term is optimized using an iterative algorithm such as ADMM (alternating direction method of multipliers). In recent years, the possibility of using denoisers for regularization has been explored in several works. A popular approach is to formally replace the proximal operator within the ADMM framework with some powerful denoiser. However, since most state-of-the-art denoisers cannot be posed as a proximal operator, one cannot guarantee the convergence of these so-called plug-and-play (PnP) algorithms. In fact, the theoretical convergence of PnP algorithms is an active research topic. In this letter, we consider the result of Chan et al. (IEEE TCI, 2017), where fixed-point convergence of an ADMM-based PnP algorithm was established for a class of denoisers. We argue that the original proof is incomplete, since convergence is not analyzed for one of the three possible cases outlined in the paper. Moreover, we explain why the argument for the other cases does not apply in this case. We give a different analysis to fill this gap, which firmly establishes the original convergence theorem.

Pravin Nair, Kunal N. Chaudhury

The bilateral and nonlocal means filters are instances of kernel-based filters that are popularly used in image processing. It was recently shown that fast and accurate bilateral filtering of grayscale images can be performed using a low-rank approximation of the kernel matrix. More specifically, based on the eigendecomposition of the kernel matrix, the overall filtering was approximated using spatial convolutions, for which efficient algorithms are available. Unfortunately, this technique cannot be scaled to high-dimensional data such as color and hyperspectral images. This is simply because one needs to compute/store a large matrix and perform its eigendecomposition in this case. We show how this problem can be solved using the Nyström method, which is generally used for approximating the eigendecomposition of large matrices. The resulting algorithm can also be used for nonlocal means filtering. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal for bilateral and nonlocal means filtering of color and hyperspectral images. In particular, our method is shown to be competitive with state-of-the-art fast algorithms, and moreover it comes with a theoretical guarantee on the approximation error.

Unni V. S., Sanjay Ghosh, Kunal N. Chaudhury

In plug-and-play image restoration, the regularization is performed using powerful denoisers such as nonlocal means (NLM) or BM3D. This is done within the framework of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), where the regularization step is formally replaced by an off-the-shelf denoiser. Each plug-and-play iteration involves the inversion of the forward model followed by a denoising step. In this paper, we present a couple of ideas for improving the efficiency of the inversion and denoising steps. First, we propose to use linearized ADMM, which generally allows us to perform the inversion at a lower cost than standard ADMM. Moreover, we can easily incorporate hard constraints into the optimization framework as a result. Second, we develop a fast algorithm for doubly stochastic NLM, originally proposed by Sreehari et al. (IEEE TCI, 2016), which is about 80x faster than brute-force computation. This particular denoiser can be expressed as the proximal map of a convex regularizer and, as a consequence, we can guarantee convergence for linearized plug-and-play ADMM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposals for super-resolution and single-photon imaging.

Ruturaj G. Gavaskar, Kunal N. Chaudhury

In the classical bilateral filter, a fixed Gaussian range kernel is used along with a spatial kernel for edge-preserving smoothing. We consider a generalization of this filter, the so-called adaptive bilateral filter, where the center and width of the Gaussian range kernel is allowed to change from pixel to pixel. Though this variant was originally proposed for sharpening and noise removal, it can also be used for other applications such as artifact removal and texture filtering. Similar to the bilateral filter, the brute-force implementation of its adaptive counterpart requires intense computations. While several fast algorithms have been proposed in the literature for bilateral filtering, most of them work only with a fixed range kernel. In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm for adaptive bilateral filtering, whose complexity does not scale with the spatial filter width. This is based on the observation that the concerned filtering can be performed purely in range space using an appropriately defined local histogram. We show that by replacing the histogram with a polynomial and the finite range-space sum with an integral, we can approximate the filter using analytic functions. In particular, an efficient algorithm is derived using the following innovations: the polynomial is fitted by matching its moments to those of the target histogram (this is done using fast convolutions), and the analytic functions are recursively computed using integration-by-parts. Our algorithm can accelerate the brute-force implementation by at least $20 \times$, without perceptible distortions in the visual quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for sharpening, JPEG deblocking, and texture filtering.

Sanjay Ghosh, Kunal N. Chaudhury

It was recently demonstrated [J. Electron. Imaging, 25(2), 2016] that one can perform fast non-local means (NLM) denoising of one-dimensional signals using a method called lifting. The cost of lifting is independent of the patch length, which dramatically reduces the run-time for large patches. Unfortunately, it is difficult to directly extend lifting for non-local means denoising of images. To bypass this, the authors proposed a separable approximation in which the image rows and columns are filtered using lifting. The overall algorithm is significantly faster than NLM, and the results are comparable in terms of PSNR. However, the separable processing often produces vertical and horizontal stripes in the image. This problem was previously addressed by using a bilateral filter-based post-smoothing, which was effective in removing some of the stripes. In this letter, we demonstrate that stripes can be mitigated in the first place simply by involving the neighboring rows (or columns) in the filtering. In other words, we use a two-dimensional search (similar to NLM), while still using one-dimensional patches (as in the previous proposal). The novelty is in the observation that one can use lifting for performing two-dimensional searches. The proposed approach produces artifact-free images, whose quality and PSNR are comparable to NLM, while being significantly faster.

Sanjay Ghosh, Amit K. Mandal, Kunal N. Chaudhury

In Non-Local Means (NLM), each pixel is denoised by performing a weighted averaging of its neighboring pixels, where the weights are computed using image patches. We demonstrate that the denoising performance of NLM can be improved by pruning the neighboring pixels, namely, by rejecting neighboring pixels whose weights are below a certain threshold $λ$. While pruning can potentially reduce pixel averaging in uniform-intensity regions, we demonstrate that there is generally an overall improvement in the denoising performance. In particular, the improvement comes from pixels situated close to edges and corners. The success of the proposed method strongly depends on the choice of the global threshold $λ$, which in turn depends on the noise level and the image characteristics. We show how Stein's unbiased estimator of the mean-squared error can be used to optimally tune $λ$, at a marginal computational overhead. We present some representative denoising results to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over NLM and its variants.

Sanjay Ghosh, Kunal N. Chaudhury

The bilateral filter is an edge-preserving smoother that has diverse applications in image processing, computer vision, computer graphics, and computational photography. The filter uses a spatial kernel along with a range kernel to perform edge-preserving smoothing. In this paper, we consider the Gaussian bilateral filter where both the kernels are Gaussian. A direct implementation of the Gaussian bilateral filter requires $O(σ_s^2)$ operations per pixel, where $σ_s$ is the standard deviation of the spatial Gaussian. In fact, it is well-known that the direct implementation is slow in practice. We present an approximation of the Gaussian bilateral filter, whereby we can cut down the number of operations to $O(1)$ per pixel for any arbitrary $σ_s$, and yet achieve very high-quality filtering that is almost indistinguishable from the output of the original filter. We demonstrate that the proposed approximation is few orders faster in practice compared to the direct implementation. We also demonstrate that the approximation is competitive with existing fast algorithms in terms of speed and accuracy.

Sanjay Ghosh, Kunal N. Chaudhury

In this paper, we consider a natural extension of the edge-preserving bilateral filter for vector-valued images. The direct computation of this non-linear filter is slow in practice. We demonstrate how a fast algorithm can be obtained by first approximating the Gaussian kernel of the bilateral filter using raised-cosines, and then using Monte Carlo sampling. We present simulation results on color images to demonstrate the accuracy of the algorithm and the speedup over the direct implementation.

Kunal N. Chaudhury, Swapnil D. Dabhade

The bilateral filter is a non-linear filter that uses a range filter along with a spatial filter to perform edge-preserving smoothing of images. A direct computation of the bilateral filter requires $O(S)$ operations per pixel, where $S$ is the size of the support of the spatial filter. In this paper, we present a fast and provably accurate algorithm for approximating the bilateral filter when the range kernel is Gaussian. In particular, for box and Gaussian spatial filters, the proposed algorithm can cut down the complexity to $O(1)$ per pixel for any arbitrary $S$. The algorithm has a simple implementation involving $N+1$ spatial filterings, where $N$ is the approximation order. We give a detailed analysis of the filtering accuracy that can be achieved by the proposed approximation in relation to the target bilateral filter. This allows us to to estimate the order $N$ required to obtain a given accuracy. We also present comprehensive numerical results to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is competitive with state-of-the-art methods in terms of speed and accuracy.

Sanjay Ghosh, Kunal N. Chaudhury

It was demonstrated in earlier work that, by approximating its range kernel using shiftable functions, the non-linear bilateral filter can be computed using a series of fast convolutions. Previous approaches based on shiftable approximation have, however, been restricted to Gaussian range kernels. In this work, we propose a novel approximation that can be applied to any range kernel, provided it has a pointwise-convergent Fourier series. More specifically, we propose to approximate the Gaussian range kernel of the bilateral filter using a Fourier basis, where the coefficients of the basis are obtained by solving a series of least-squares problems. The coefficients can be efficiently computed using a recursive form of the QR decomposition. By controlling the cardinality of the Fourier basis, we can obtain a good tradeoff between the run-time and the filtering accuracy. In particular, we are able to guarantee sub-pixel accuracy for the overall filtering, which is not provided by most existing methods for fast bilateral filtering. We present simulation results to demonstrate the speed and accuracy of the proposed algorithm.

Kunal N. Chaudhury

The bilateral filter is a versatile non-linear filter that has found diverse applications in image processing, computer vision, computer graphics, and computational photography. A widely-used form of the filter is the Gaussian bilateral filter in which both the spatial and range kernels are Gaussian. A direct implementation of this filter requires $O(σ^2)$ operations per pixel, where $σ$ is the standard deviation of the spatial Gaussian. In this paper, we propose an accurate approximation algorithm that can cut down the computational complexity to $O(1)$ per pixel for any arbitrary $σ$ (constant-time implementation). This is based on the observation that the range kernel operates via the translations of a fixed Gaussian over the range space, and that these translated Gaussians can be accurately approximated using the so-called Gauss-polynomials. The overall algorithm emerging from this approximation involves a series of spatial Gaussian filtering, which can be implemented in constant-time using separability and recursion. We present some preliminary results to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm compares favorably with some of the existing fast algorithms in terms of speed and accuracy.

Kunal N. Chaudhury, Kollipara Rithwik

The bilateral filter is known to be quite effective in denoising images corrupted with small dosages of additive Gaussian noise. The denoising performance of the filter, however, is known to degrade quickly with the increase in noise level. Several adaptations of the filter have been proposed in the literature to address this shortcoming, but often at a substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we report a simple pre-processing step that can substantially improve the denoising performance of the bilateral filter, at almost no additional cost. The modified filter is designed to be robust at large noise levels, and often tends to perform poorly below a certain noise threshold. To get the best of the original and the modified filter, we propose to combine them in a weighted fashion, where the weights are chosen to minimize (a surrogate of) the oracle mean-squared-error (MSE). The optimally-weighted filter is thus guaranteed to perform better than either of the component filters in terms of the MSE, at all noise levels. We also provide a fast algorithm for the weighted filtering. Visual and quantitative denoising results on standard test images are reported which demonstrate that the improvement over the original filter is significant both visually and in terms of PSNR. Moreover, the denoising performance of the optimally-weighted bilateral filter is competitive with the computation-intensive non-local means filter.

Kunal N. Chaudhury, K. R. Ramakrishnan

The Euclidean Median (EM) of a set of points $Ω$ in an Euclidean space is the point x minimizing the (weighted) sum of the Euclidean distances of x to the points in $Ω$. While there exits no closed-form expression for the EM, it can nevertheless be computed using iterative methods such as the Wieszfeld algorithm. The EM has classically been used as a robust estimator of centrality for multivariate data. It was recently demonstrated that the EM can be used to perform robust patch-based denoising of images by generalizing the popular Non-Local Means algorithm. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for computing the EM (and its box-constrained counterpart) using variable splitting and the method of augmented Lagrangian. The attractive feature of this approach is that the subproblems involved in the ADMM-based optimization of the augmented Lagrangian can be resolved using simple closed-form projections. The proposed ADMM solver is used for robust patch-based image denoising and is shown to exhibit faster convergence compared to an existing solver.

Kunal N. Chaudhury, Yuehaw Khoo, Amit Singer

Consider $N$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and $M$ local coordinate systems that are related through unknown rigid transforms. For each point we are given (possibly noisy) measurements of its local coordinates in some of the coordinate systems. Alternatively, for each coordinate system, we observe the coordinates of a subset of the points. The problem of estimating the global coordinates of the $N$ points (up to a rigid transform) from such measurements comes up in distributed approaches to molecular conformation and sensor network localization, and also in computer vision and graphics. The least-squares formulation of this problem, though non-convex, has a well known closed-form solution when $M=2$ (based on the singular value decomposition). However, no closed form solution is known for $M\geq 3$. In this paper, we demonstrate how the least-squares formulation can be relaxed into a convex program, namely a semidefinite program (SDP). By setting up connections between the uniqueness of this SDP and results from rigidity theory, we prove conditions for exact and stable recovery for the SDP relaxation. In particular, we prove that the SDP relaxation can guarantee recovery under more adversarial conditions compared to earlier proposed spectral relaxations, and derive error bounds for the registration error incurred by the SDP relaxation. We also present results of numerical experiments on simulated data to confirm the theoretical findings. We empirically demonstrate that (a) unlike the spectral relaxation, the relaxation gap is mostly zero for the semidefinite program (i.e., we are able to solve the original non-convex least-squares problem) up to a certain noise threshold, and (b) the semidefinite program performs significantly better than spectral and manifold-optimization methods, particularly at large noise levels.

Kunal N. Chaudhury

Recently, it was demonstrated in [CS2012,CS2013] that the robustness of the classical Non-Local Means (NLM) algorithm [BCM2005] can be improved by incorporating $\ell^p (0 < p \leq 2)$ regression into the NLM framework. This general optimization framework, called Non-Local Patch Regression (NLPR), contains NLM as a special case. Denoising results on synthetic and natural images show that NLPR consistently performs better than NLM beyond a moderate noise level, and significantly so when $p$ is close to zero. An iteratively reweighted least-squares (IRLS) algorithm was proposed for solving the regression problem in NLPR, where the NLM output was used to initialize the iterations. Based on exhaustive numerical experiments, we observe that the IRLS algorithm is globally convergent (for arbitrary initialization) in the convex regime $1 \leq p \leq 2$, and locally convergent (fails very rarely using NLM initialization) in the non-convex regime $0 < p < 1$. In this letter, we adapt the "majorize-minimize" framework introduced in [Voss1980] to explain these observations. [CS2012] Chaudhury et al. (2012), "Non-local Euclidean medians," IEEE Signal Processing Letters. [CS2013] Chaudhury et al. (2013), "Non-local patch regression: Robust image denoising in patch space," IEEE ICASSP. [BCM2005] Buades et al. (2005), "A review of image denoising algorithms, with a new one," Multiscale Modeling and Simulation. [Voss1980] Voss et al. (1980), "Linear convergence of generalized Weiszfeld's method," Computing.

Kunal N. Chaudhury, Amit Singer

In this letter, we note that the denoising performance of Non-Local Means (NLM) at large noise levels can be improved by replacing the mean by the Euclidean median. We call this new denoising algorithm the Non-Local Euclidean Medians (NLEM). At the heart of NLEM is the observation that the median is more robust to outliers than the mean. In particular, we provide a simple geometric insight that explains why NLEM performs better than NLM in the vicinity of edges, particularly at large noise levels. NLEM can be efficiently implemented using iteratively reweighted least squares, and its computational complexity is comparable to that of NLM. We provide some preliminary results to study the proposed algorithm and to compare it with NLM.

Kunal N. Chaudhury

A direct implementation of the bilateral filter [1] requires O(σ_s^2) operations per pixel, where σ_s is the (effective) width of the spatial kernel. A fast implementation of the bilateral filter was recently proposed in [2] that required O(1) operations per pixel with respect to σ_s. This was done by using trigonometric functions for the range kernel of the bilateral filter, and by exploiting their so-called shiftability property. In particular, a fast implementation of the Gaussian bilateral filter was realized by approximating the Gaussian range kernel using raised cosines. Later, it was demonstrated in [3] that this idea could be extended to a larger class of filters, including the popular non-local means filter [4]. As already observed in [2], a flip side of this approach was that the run time depended on the width σ_r of the range kernel. For an image with (local) intensity variations in the range [0,T], the run time scaled as O(T^2/σ^2_r) with σ_r. This made it difficult to implement narrow range kernels, particularly for images with large dynamic range. We discuss this problem in this note, and propose some simple steps to accelerate the implementation in general, and for small σ_r in particular. [1] C. Tomasi and R. Manduchi, "Bilateral filtering for gray and color images", Proc. IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, 1998. [2] K.N. Chaudhury, Daniel Sage, and M. Unser, "Fast O(1) bilateral filtering using trigonometric range kernels", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2011. [3] K.N. Chaudhury, "Constant-time filtering using shiftable kernels", IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 2011. [4] A. Buades, B. Coll, and J.M. Morel, "A review of image denoising algorithms, with a new one", Multiscale Modeling and Simulation, 2005.