Ranjan Mondal

Ranjan Mondal, Pulak Purkait, Sanchayan Santra et al.

Mathematical morphological methods have successfully been applied to filter out (emphasize or remove) different structures of an image. However, it is argued that these methods could be suitable for the task only if the type and order of the filter(s) as well as the shape and size of operator kernel are designed properly. Thus the existing filtering operators are problem (instance) specific and are designed by the domain experts. In this work we propose a morphological network that emulates classical morphological filtering consisting of a series of erosion and dilation operators with trainable structuring elements. We evaluate the proposed network for image de-raining task where the SSIM and mean absolute error (MAE) loss corresponding to predicted and ground-truth clean image is back-propagated through the network to train the structuring elements. We observe that a single morphological network can de-rain an image with any arbitrary shaped rain-droplets and achieves similar performance with the contemporary CNNs for this task with a fraction of trainable parameters (network size). The proposed morphological network(MorphoN) is not designed specifically for de-raining and can readily be applied to similar filtering / noise cleaning tasks. The source code can be found here https://github.com/ranjanZ/2D-Morphological-Network

Ranjan Mondal, Sanchayan Santra, Soumendu Sundar Mukherjee et al.

Morphological neurons, that is morphological operators such as dilation and erosion with learnable structuring elements, have intrigued researchers for quite some time because of the power these operators bring to the table despite their simplicity. These operators are known to be powerful nonlinear tools, but for a given problem coming up with a sequence of operations and their structuring element is a non-trivial task. So, the existing works have mainly focused on this part of the problem without delving deep into their applicability as generic operators. A few works have tried to utilize morphological neurons as a part of classification (and regression) networks when the input is a feature vector. However, these methods mainly focus on a specific problem, without going into generic theoretical analysis. In this work, we have theoretically analyzed morphological neurons and have shown that these are far more powerful than previously anticipated. Our proposed morphological block, containing dilation and erosion followed by their linear combination, represents a sum of hinge functions. Existing works show that hinge functions perform quite well in classification and regression problems. Two morphological blocks can even approximate any continuous function. However, to facilitate the theoretical analysis that we have done in this paper, we have restricted ourselves to the 1D version of the operators, where the structuring element operates on the whole input. Experimental evaluations also indicate the effectiveness of networks built with morphological neurons, over similarly structured neural networks.

Sanchayan Santra, Ranjan Mondal, Pranoy Panda et al.

Haze limits the visibility of outdoor images, due to the existence of fog, smoke and dust in the atmosphere. Image dehazing methods try to recover haze-free image by removing the effect of haze from a given input image. In this paper, we present an end to end system, which takes a hazy image as its input and returns a dehazed image. The proposed method learns the mapping between a hazy image and its corresponding transmittance map and the environmental illumination, by using a multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network. Although most of the time haze appears grayish in color, its color may vary depending on the color of the environmental illumination. Very few of the existing image dehazing methods have laid stress on its accurate estimation. But the color of the dehazed image and the estimated transmittance depends on the environmental illumination. Our proposed method exploits the relationship between the transmittance values and the environmental illumination as per the haze imaging model and estimates both of them. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show, the estimates are accurate enough.