Abstract-Multiresolution representations are very effective for analyzing the information content of images. We study the properties of the operator which approximates a signal at a given resolution. We show that the difference of information between the approximation of a signal at the resolutions 2 ’ + ’ and 2jcan be extracted by decomposing this signal on a wavelet orthonormal basis of L*(R”). In LL(R), a wavelet orthonormal basis is a family of functions ( @ w (2’ ~-n)),,,“jEZt, which is built by dilating and translating a unique function t+r (xl. This decomposition defines an orthogonal multiresolution representation called a wavelet representation. It is computed with a pyramidal algorithm based on convolutions with quadrature mirror lilters. For images, the wavelet representation differentiates several spatial orientations. We study the application of this representation to data compression in image coding, texture discrimination and fractal analysis. Index Terms-Coding, fractals, multiresolution pyramids, quadrature mirror filters, texture discrimination, wavelet transform. I I.

Several variations are given on the construction of orthonormal bases of wavelets with compact support. They have, respectively, more symmetry, more regularity, or more vanishing moments for the scaling function than the examples constructed in Daubechies [Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 41 (1988), pp. 909-996].

Abstract. Stereo matching is one of the most active research areas in computer vision. While a large number of algorithms for stereo correspondence have been developed, relatively little work has been done on characterizing their performance. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of dense, two-frame stereo methods. Our taxonomy is designed to assess the different components and design decisions made in individual stereo algorithms. Using this taxonomy, we compare existing stereo methods and present experiments evaluating the performance of many different variants. In order to establish a common software platform and a collection of data sets for easy evaluation, we have designed a stand-alone, flexible C++ implementation that enables the evaluation of individual components and that can easily be extended to include new algorithms. We have also produced several new multi-frame stereo data sets with ground truth and are making both the code and data sets available on the Web. Finally, we include a comparative evaluation of a large set of today’s best-performing stereo algorithms.

While different optical flow techniques continue to appear, there has been a lack of quantitative evaluation of existing methods. For a common set of real and synthetic image sequences, we report the results of a number of regularly cited optical flow techniques, including instances of differential, matching, energy-based and phase-based methods. Our comparisons are primarily empirical, and concentrate on the accuracy, reliability and density of the velocity measurements; they show that performance can differ significantly among the techniques we implemented.

Oriented filters are useful in many early vision and image processing tasks. One often needs to apply the same filter, rotated to different angles under adaptive control, or wishes to calculate the filter response at various orientations. We present an efficient architecture to synthesize filters of arbitrary orientations from linear combinations of basis filters, allowing one to adaptively "steer" a filter to any orientation, and to determine analytically the filter output as a function of orientation.

The history of the theory and practice of quantization dates to 1948, although similar ideas had appeared in the literature as long ago as 1898. The fundamental role of quantization in modulation and analog-to-digital conversion was first recognized during the early development of pulsecode modulation systems, especially in the 1948 paper of Oliver, Pierce, and Shannon. Also in 1948, Bennett published the first high-resolution analysis of quantization and an exact analysis of quantization noise for Gaussian processes, and Shannon published the beginnings of rate distortion theory, which would provide a theory for quantization as analog-to-digital conversion and as data compression. Beginning with these three papers of fifty years ago, we trace the history of quantization from its origins through this decade, and we survey the fundamentals of the theory and many of the popular and promising techniques for quantization.

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We show a learning-based method for low-level vision problems. We set-up a Markov network of patches of the image and the underlying scene. A factorization approximation allows us to easily learn the parameters of the Markov network from synthetic examples of image/scene pairs, and to e ciently propagate image information. Monte Carlo simulations justify this approximation. We apply this to the \super-resolution " problem (estimating high frequency details from a low-resolution image), showing good results. For the motion estimation problem, we show resolution of the aperture problem and lling-in arising from application of the same probabilistic machinery.

Orthogonal wavelet transforms have recently become a popular representation for multiscale signal and image analysis. One of the major drawbacks of these representations is their lack of translation invariance: the content of wavelet subbands is unstable under translations of the input signal. Wavelet transforms are also unstable with respect to dilations of the input signal, and in two dimensions, rotations of the input signal. We formalize these problems by defining a type of translation invariance that we call "shiftability". In the spatial domain, shiftability corresponds to a lack of aliasing; thus, the conditions under which the property holds are specified by the sampling theorem. Shiftability may also be considered in the context of other domains, particularly orientation and scale. We explore "jointly shiftable" transforms that are simultaneously shiftable in more than one domain. Two examples of jointly shiftable transforms are designed and implemented: a one-dimensional tran...

The limitations of commonly used separable extensions of one-dimensional transforms, such as the Fourier and wavelet transforms, in capturing the geometry of image edges are well known. In this paper, we pursue a “true” two-dimensional transform that can capture the intrinsic geometrical structure that is key in visual information. The main challenge in exploring geometry in images comes from the discrete nature of the data. Thus, unlike other approaches, such as curvelets, that first develop a transform in the continuous domain and then discretize for sampled data, our approach starts with a discrete-domain construction and then studies its convergence to an expansion in the continuous domain. Specifically, we construct a discrete-domain multiresolution and multidirection expansion using non-separable filter banks, in much the same way that wavelets were derived from filter banks. This construction results in a flexible multiresolution, local, and directional image expansion using contour segments, and thus it is named the contourlet transform. The discrete contourlet transform has a fast iterated filter bank algorithm that requires an order N operations for N-pixel images. Furthermore, we establish a precise link between the developed filter bank and the associated continuousdomain contourlet expansion via a directional multiresolution analysis framework. We show that with parabolic scaling and sufficient directional vanishing moments, contourlets achieve the optimal approximation rate for piecewise smooth functions with discontinuities along twice continuously differentiable curves. Finally, we show some numerical experiments demonstrating the potential of contourlets in several image processing applications.