Wing-Shan Tam

With the wide deployment of digital image capturing equipment, the need of denoising to produce a crystal clear image from noisy capture environment has become indispensable. This work presents a novel image denoising method that can tackle both impulsive noise, such as salt and pepper noise (SAPN), and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), such as hot carrier noise from CMOS sensor, at the same time. We propose to use low-rank matrix approximation to form the basic denoising framework, as it has the advantage of preserving the spatial integrity of the image. To mitigate the SAPN, the original noise corrupted image is randomly sampled to produce sampled image sets. Low-rank matrix factorization method (LRMF) via alternating minimization denoising method is applied to all sampled images, and the resultant images are fused together via a wavelet fusion with hard threshold denoising. Since the sampled image sets have independent but identical noise property, the wavelet fusion serves as the effective mean to remove the AWGN, while the LRMF method suppress the SAPN. Simulation results are presented which vividly show the denoised images obtained by the proposed method can achieve crystal clear image with strong structural integrity and showing good performance in both subjective and objective metrics.

This paper reviews the implementation of fractal based image interpolation, the associated visual artifacts of the interpolated images, and various techniques, including novel contributions, that alleviate these awkward visual artifacts to achieve visually pleasant interpolated image. The fractal interpolation methods considered in this paper are based on the plain Iterative Function System (IFS) in spatial domain without additional transformation, where we believe that the benefits of additional transformation can be added onto the presented study without complication. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the discussed techniques, together with the pros and cons of each techniques. Finally, a novel spatial domain interleave layer has been proposed to add to the IFS image system for improving the performance of the system from image zooming to interpolation with the preservation of the pixel intensity from the original low resolution image.