Xiaoyu Shang

Da He, Jiasheng Zhou, Xiaoyu Shang et al.

As a hybrid imaging technology, photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) imaging suffers from noise due to the maximum permissible exposure of laser intensity, attenuation of ultrasound in the tissue, and the inherent noise of the transducer. De-noising is a post-processing method to reduce noise, and PAM image quality can be recovered. However, previous de-noising techniques usually heavily rely on mathematical priors as well as manually selected parameters, resulting in unsatisfactory and slow de-noising performance for different noisy images, which greatly hinders practical and clinical applications. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based method to remove complex noise from PAM images without mathematical priors and manual selection of settings for different input images. An attention enhanced generative adversarial network is used to extract image features and remove various noises. The proposed method is demonstrated on both synthetic and real datasets, including phantom (leaf veins) and in vivo (mouse ear blood vessels and zebrafish pigment) experiments. The results show that compared with previous PAM de-noising methods, our method exhibits good performance in recovering images qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, the de-noising speed of 0.016 s is achieved for an image with $256\times256$ pixels. Our approach is effective and practical for the de-noising of PAM images.

Da He, Xiaoyu Shang, Jiajia Luo

Temperature difference-induced mist adhered to the glass, such as windshield, camera lens, is often inhomogeneous and obscure, easily obstructing the vision and severely degrading the image. Together with adherent raindrops, they bring considerable challenges to various vision systems but without enough attention. Recent methods for other similar problems typically use hand-crafted priors to generate spatial attention maps. In this work, we newly present a problem of image degradation caused by adherent mist and raindrops. An attentive convolutional network is adopted to visually remove the adherent mist and raindrop from a single image. A baseline architecture with general channel-wise attention, spatial attention, and multilevel feature fusion is used. Considering the variations and regional characteristics of adherent mist and raindrops, we apply interpolation-based pyramid-attention blocks to perceive spatial information at different scales. Experiments show that the proposed method can improve severely degraded images' visibility, both qualitatively and quantitatively. More applied experiments show that this underrated practical problem is critical to high-level vision scenes. Our method also achieves state-of-the-art performance on conventional dehazing and pure de-raindrop problems, in addition to our task of handling adherent mist and raindrops.

Jiasheng Zhou, Da He, Xiaoyu Shang et al.

Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) has been a promising biomedical imaging technology in recent years. However, the point-by-point scanning mechanism results in low-speed imaging, which limits the application of PAM. Reducing sampling density can naturally shorten image acquisition time, which is at the cost of image quality. In this work, we propose a method using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to improve the quality of sparse PAM images, thereby speeding up image acquisition while keeping good image quality. The CNN model utilizes both squeeze-and-excitation blocks and residual blocks to achieve the enhancement, which is a mapping from a 1/4 or 1/16 low-sampling sparse PAM image to a latent fully-sampled image. The perceptual loss function is applied to keep the fidelity of images. The model is mainly trained and validated on PAM images of leaf veins. The experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method, which significantly outperforms existing methods quantitatively and qualitatively. Our model is also tested using in vivo PAM images of blood vessels of mouse ears and eyes. The results show that the model can enhance the image quality of the sparse PAM image of blood vessels from several aspects, which may help fast PAM and facilitate its clinical applications.