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Section: New Results

Image processing

Participants : Marie-Odile Berger, Fabien Pierre, Frédéric Sur.

Computational photomechanics

In computational photomechanics, mainly two methods are available for estimating displacement and strain fields on the surface of a material specimen subjected to a mechanical test, namely digital image correlation (DIC) and localized spectrum analysis (LSA). With both methods, a contrasted pattern marks the surface of the specimen: either a random speckle pattern for DIC or a regular pattern for LSA, this latter method being based on Fourier analysis. It is a challenging problem since strains are tiny quantities giving deformations often not visible to the naked eye. The recent outcomes of our collaboration with Institut Pascal (Université Clermont-Auvergne) focus on two areas.

We have investigated the optimization of the pattern marking the specimen [13], which is the topic of several recent papers. Checkerboard is the optimized pattern in terms of sensor noise propagation when the signal is correctly sampled, but its periodicity causes convergence issues with DIC. The consequence is that checkerboards are not used in DIC applications although they are optimal in terms of sensor noise propagation. We have shown that it is possible to use LSA to estimate displacement and strain fields from checkerboard images, although LSA was originally designed to process 2D grid images. A comparative study of checkerboards and grids shows that, under similar experimental conditions, the noise level in displacement and strain maps obtained with checkerboards is lower than that obtained with classic 2D grids. A patent on this topic was filed [28].

Another scientific contribution concerns the restoration of displacement and strain maps. DIC and LSA both provide displacement fields equal to the actual one convoluted by a kernel known a priori. The kernel indeed corresponds to the Savitzky-Golay filter in DIC, and to the analysis window of the windowed Fourier transform used in LSA. While convolution reduces noise level, it also gives a systematic measurement error. We have proposed a deconvolution method to retrieve the actual displacement and strain fields from the output of DIC or LSA [12]. The proposed algorithm can be considered as a variant of Van Cittert deconvolution, based on the small strain assumption. It is demonstrated that it allows enhancing fine details in displacement and strain maps, while improving spatial resolution.

Cartoon-texture decomposition

Decomposing an image as the sum of geometric and textural components is a popular problem of image analysis. In this problem, known as cartoon and texture decomposition, the cartoon component is piecewise smooth, made of the geometric shapes of the images, and the texture component is made of stationary or quasi-stationary oscillatory patterns filling the shapes. Microtextures being characterized by their power spectrum, we propose to extract cartoon and texture components from the information provided by the power spectrum of image patches. The contribution of texture to the spectrum of a patch is detected as statistically significant spectral components with respect to a null hypothesis modeling the power spectrum of a non-textured patch. The null-hypothesis model is built upon a coarse cartoon representation obtained by a basic yet fast filtering algorithm of the literature. The coarse decomposition is obtained in the spatial domain and is an input of the proposed spectral approach. We thus design a "dual domain" method. The statistical model is also built upon the power spectrum of patches with similar textures across the image. The proposed approach therefore falls within the family of non-local methods. Compared to variational methods or fast filers, the proposed non-local dual-domain approach [16] is shown to achieve a good compromise between computation time and accuracy. Matlab code is publicly available.

Variational methods for image processing

The work described in  [20] aims to couple the powerful prediction of the convolutional neural network (CNN) to the accuracy at pixel scale of the variational methods. We have focused on a CNN which is able to compute a statistical distribution of the colors for each pixel of the image based on a learning stage on a large color image database. A variational method able to select a color candidate among a given set while performing regularization of the result is combined with a CNN, to design a fully automatic image colorization framework with an improved accuracy in comparison with CNN alone. To solve the proposed model, we have proposed in [17] a novel accelerated alternating optimization scheme to solve block biconvex nonsmooth problems whose objectives can be split into smooth (separable) regularizers and simple coupling terms. The proposed method performs a Bregman distance-based generalization of the well-known forward–backward splitting for each block, along with an inertial strategy which aims at getting empirical acceleration. We discuss the theoretical convergence of the proposed scheme and provide numerical experiments on image colorization.