Jan Henrik Fitschen

Ronny Bergmann, Jan Henrik Fitschen, Johannes Persch et al.

Recently variational models with priors involving first and second order derivatives resp. differences were successfully applied for image restoration. There are several ways to incorporate the derivatives of first and second order into the prior, for example additive coupling or using infimal convolution (IC), as well as the more general model of total generalized variation (TGV). The later two methods give also decompositions of the restored images into image components with distinct "smoothness" properties which are useful in applications. This paper is the first attempt to generalize these models to manifold-valued images. We propose both extrinsic and intrinsic approaches. The extrinsic approach is based on embedding the manifold into an Euclidean space of higher dimension. Models following this approach can be formulated within the Euclidean space with a constraint restricting them to the manifold. Then alternating direction methods of multipliers can be employed for finding minima. However, the components within the infimal convolution or total generalized variation decomposition live in the embedding space rather than on the manifold which makes their interpretation difficult. Therefore we also investigate two intrinsic approaches. For manifolds which are Lie groups we propose three priors which exploit the group operation, an additive one, another with IC coupling and a third TGV like one. For computing the minimizers of the intrinsic models we apply gradient descent algorithms. For general Riemannian manifolds we further define a model for infimal convolution based on the recently developed second order differences. We demonstrate by numerical examples that our approaches works well for the circle, the 2-sphere, the rotation group, and the manifold of positive definite matrices with the affine invariant metric.

Jan Henrik Fitschen, Friederike Laus, Gabriele Steidl

We propose two models for the interpolation between RGB images based on the dynamic optimal transport model of Benamou and Brenier [8]. While the application of dynamic optimal transport and its extensions to unbalanced transform were examined for gray-values images in various papers, this is the first attempt to generalize the idea to color images. The nontrivial task to incorporate color into the model is tackled by considering RGB images as three-dimensional arrays, where the transport in the RGB direction is performed in a periodic way. Following the approach of Papadakis et al. [35] for gray-value images we propose two discrete variational models, a constrained and a penalized one which can also handle unbalanced transport. We show that a minimizer of our discrete model exists, but it is not unique for some special initial/final images. For minimizing the resulting functionals we apply a primal-dual algorithm. One step of this algorithm requires the solution of a four-dimensional discretized Poisson equation with various boundary conditions in each dimension. For instance, for the penalized approach we have simultaneously zero, mirror and periodic boundary conditions. The solution can be computed efficiently using fast Sin-I, Cos-II and Fourier transforms. Numerical examples demonstrate the meaningfulness of our model.

Frank Balle, Tilmann Beck, Dietmar Eifler et al.

In this paper we deal with the important problem of estimating the local strain tensor from a sequence of micro-structural images realized during deformation tests of engineering materials. Since the strain tensor is defined via the Jacobian of the displacement field, we propose to compute the displacement field by a variational model which takes care of properties of the Jacobian of the displacement field. In particular we are interested in areas of high strain. The data term of our variational model relies on the brightness invariance property of the image sequence. As prior we choose the second order total generalized variation of the displacement field. This prior splits the Jacobian of the displacement field into a smooth and a non-smooth part. The latter reflects the material cracks. An additional constraint is incorporated to handle physical properties of the non-smooth part for tensile tests. We prove that the resulting convex model has a minimizer and show how a primal-dual method can be applied to find a minimizer. The corresponding algorithm has the advantage that the strain tensor is directly computed within the iteration process. Our algorithm is further equipped with a coarse-to-fine strategy to cope with larger displacements. Numerical examples with simulated and experimental data demonstrate the very good performance of our algorithm. In comparison to state-of-the-art engineering software for strain analysis our method can resolve local phenomena much better.

Jan Henrik Fitschen, Jianwei Ma, Sebastian Schuff

Focused ion beam (FIB) tomography provides high resolution volumetric images on a micro scale. However, due to the physical acquisition process the resulting images are often corrupted by a so-called curtaining or waterfall effect. In this paper, a new convex variational model for removing such effects is proposed. More precisely, an infimal convolution model is applied to split the corrupted 3D image into the clean image and two types of corruptions, namely a striped part and a laminar one. As regularizing terms different direction dependent first and second order differences are used to cope with the specific structure of the corruptions. This generalizes discrete unidirectional total variational (TV) approaches. A minimizer of the model is computed by well-known primal dual techniques. Numerical examples show the very good performance of our new method for artificial and real-world data. Besides FIB tomography, we have also successfully applied our technique for the removal of pure stripes in Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data.

Jan Henrik Fitschen, Katharina Losch, Gabriele Steidl

Intensity inhomogeneities in images constitute a considerable challenge in image segmentation. In this paper we propose a novel biconvex variational model to tackle this task. We combine a total variation approach for multi class segmentation with a multiplicative model to handle the inhomogeneities. Our method assumes that the image intensity is the product of a smoothly varying part and a component which resembles important image structures such as edges. Therefore, we penalize in addition to the total variation of the label assignment matrix a quadratic difference term to cope with the smoothly varying factor. A critical point of our biconvex functional is computed by a modified proximal alternating linearized minimization method (PALM). We show that the assumptions for the convergence of the algorithm are fulfilled by our model. Various numerical examples demonstrate the very good performance of our method. Particular attention is paid to the segmentation of 3D FIB tomographical images which was indeed the motivation of our work.

Ronny Bergmann, Jan Henrik Fitschen, Johannes Persch et al.

Based on an idea in [4] we propose a new iterative multiplicative filtering algorithm for label assignment matrices which can be used for the supervised partitioning of data. Starting with a row-normalized matrix containing the averaged distances between prior features and the observed ones the method assigns in a very efficient way labels to the data. We interpret the algorithm as a gradient ascent method with respect to a certain function on the product manifold of positive numbers followed by a reprojection onto a subset of the probability simplex consisting of vectors whose components are bounded away from zero by a small constant. While such boundedness away from zero is necessary to avoid an arithmetic underflow, our convergence results imply that they are also necessary for theoretical reasons. Numerical examples show that the proposed simple and fast algorithm leads to very good results. In particular we apply the method for the partitioning of manifold-valued images.

Jan Henrik Fitschen, Friederike Laus, Gabriele Steidl

Recently, Papadakis et al. proposed an efficient primal-dual algorithm for solving the dynamic optimal transport problem with quadratic ground cost and measures having densities with respect to the Lebesgue measure. It is based on the fluid mechanics formulation by Benamou and Brenier and proximal splitting schemes. In this paper we extend the framework to color image processing. We show how the transportation problem for RGB color images can be tackled by prescribing periodic boundary conditions in the color dimension. This requires the solution of a 4D Poisson equation with mixed Neumann and periodic boundary conditions in each iteration step of the algorithm. This 4D Poisson equation can be efficiently handled by fast Fourier and Cosine transforms. Furthermore, we sketch how the same idea can be used in a modified way to transport periodic 1D data such as the histogram of cyclic hue components of images. We discuss the existence and uniqueness of a minimizer of the associated energy functional. Numerical examples illustrate the meaningfulness of our approach.