Hang Yang

Hang Yang, Yitian Xu, Xuhua Liu

Image steganography, defined as the practice of concealing information within another image, traditionally encounters security challenges when its methods become publicly known or are under attack. To address this, a novel private key-based image steganography technique has been introduced. This approach ensures the security of the hidden information, as access requires a corresponding private key, regardless of the public knowledge of the steganography method. Experimental evidence has been presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method and showcasing its real-world applicability. Furthermore, a critical challenge in the invertible image steganography process has been identified by us: the transfer of non-essential, or `garbage', information from the secret to the host pipeline. To tackle this issue, the decay weight has been introduced to control the information transfer, effectively filtering out irrelevant data and enhancing the performance of image steganography. The code for this technique is publicly accessible at https://github.com/yanghangAI/DKiS, and a practical demonstration can be found at http://yanghang.site/hidekey.

Hang Yang, Xiaotian Wu, Xinglong Sun

The goal of blind image deblurring is to recover sharp image from one input blurred image with an unknown blur kernel. Most of image deblurring approaches focus on developing image priors, however, there is not enough attention to the influence of image details and structures on the blur kernel estimation. What is the useful image structure and how to choose a good deblurring region? In this work, we propose a deep neural network model method for selecting good regions to estimate blur kernel. First we construct image patches with labels and train a deep neural networks, then the learned model is applied to determine which region of the image is most suitable to deblur. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed approach is effective, and could be able to select good regions for image deblurring.

Hang Yang, Zhongbo Zhang

In this paper, we present a novel upsampling framework to enhance the spatial resolution of the depth image. In our framework, the upscaling of a low-resolution depth image is guided by a corresponding intensity images, we formulate it as a cost aggregation problem with the guided filter. However, the guided filter does not make full use of the properties of the depth image. Since depth images have quite sparse gradients, it inspires us to regularize the gradients for improving depth upscaling results. Statistics show a special property of depth images, that is, there is a non-ignorable part of pixels whose horizontal or vertical derivatives are equal to $\pm 1$. Considering this special property, we propose a low gradient regularization method which reduces the penalty for horizontal or vertical derivative $\pm1$. The proposed low gradient regularization is integrated with the guided filter into the depth image upsampling method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach both qualitatively and quantitatively compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Hang Yang, Ming Zhu, Zhongbo Zhang et al.

In this work, we propose a new approach for efficient edge-preserving image deconvolution. Our algorithm is based on a novel type of explicit image filter - guided filter. The guided filter can be used as an edge-preserving smoothing operator like the popular bilateral filter, but has better behaviors near edges. We propose an efficient iterative algorithm with the decouple of deblurring and denoising steps in the restoration process. In deblurring step, we proposed two cost function which could be computed with fast Fourier transform efficiently. The solution of the first one is used as the guidance image, and another solution will be filtered in next step. In the denoising step, the guided filter is used with the two obtained images for efficient edge-preserving filtering. Furthermore, we derive a simple and effective method to automatically adjust the regularization parameter at each iteration. We compare our deconvolution algorithm with many competitive deconvolution techniques in terms of ISNR and visual quality.

Hang Yang, Zhongbo Zhang, Yujing Guan

Image deconvolution is still to be a challenging ill-posed problem for recovering a clear image from a given blurry image, when the point spread function is known. Although competitive deconvolution methods are numerically impressive and approach theoretical limits, they are becoming more complex, making analysis, and implementation difficult. Furthermore, accurate estimation of the regularization parameter is not easy for successfully solving image deconvolution problems. In this paper, we develop an effective approach for image restoration based on one explicit image filter - guided filter. By applying the decouple of denoising and deblurring techniques to the deconvolution model, we reduce the optimization complexity and achieve a simple but effective algorithm to automatically compute the parameter in each iteration, which is based on Morozov's discrepancy principle. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms many state-of-the-art deconvolution methods in terms of both ISNR and visual quality.