PolyMage: Automatic Optimization for Image Processing Pipelines

This paper presents the design and implementation of PolyMage, a domain-specific language and compiler for image processing pipelines. An image processing pipeline can be viewed as a graph of interconnected stages which process images successively. Each stage typically performs one of point-wise, stencil, reduction or data-dependent operations on image pixels. Individual stages in a pipeline typically exhibit abundant data parallelism that can be exploited with relative ease. However, the stages also require high memory bandwidth preventing effective utilization of parallelism available on modern architectures. For applications that demand high performance, the traditional options are to use optimized libraries like OpenCV or to optimize manually. While using libraries precludes optimization across library routines, manual optimization accounting for both parallelism and locality is very tedious. The focus of our system, PolyMage, is on automatically generating high-performance implementations of image processing pipelines expressed in a high-level declarative language. Our optimization approach primarily relies on the transformation and code generation capabilities of the polyhedral compiler framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model-driven compiler for image processing pipelines that performs complex fusion, tiling, and storage optimization automatically. Experimental results on a modern multicore system show that the performance achieved by our automatic approach is up to 1.81x better than that achieved through manual tuning in Halide, a state-of-the-art language and compiler for image processing pipelines. For a camera raw image processing pipeline, our performance is comparable to that of a hand-tuned implementation.

Maximum Spreading of Liquid Drops Impacting on Groove-Textured Surfaces: Effect of Surface Texture

Maximum, spreading of liquid drops impacting on solid surfaces textured with unidirectional parallel grooves is studied for drop Weber number in the range 1-100 focusing on the role of texture geometry and wettability. The maximum spread factor of impacting drops measured perpendicular to grooves; beta(m,perpendicular to) is seen to be less than, that:measured parallel to grooves, beta(m,perpendicular to).The difference between beta(m,perpendicular to), and beta(m,parallel to) increases with drop impact velocity. This deviation of beta(m,perpendicular to) from beta(m,parallel to) is analyzed by considering the possible mechanisms, correspond, ing to experimental observations (1) impregnation of drop into the grooves, (2) convex shape of liquid vapor interface near contact line at maximum spreading, and (3) contact line pinning of spreading drop at the pillar edges by incorporating them into an energy conservation-based model. The analysis reveals that contact line pinning offers a physically meaningful justification of the observed: deviation of beta(m,perpendicular to) from beta(m,parallel to) compared to other possible candidates. A unified model, incorporating all the above-mentioned mechanisms, is formulated, which predicts beta(m,perpendicular to) on several groove-textured surfaces made of intrinsically hydrophilic and hydrophobic materials with an average error of 8.3%. The effect of groove-texture geometrical parameters,on maximum drop spreading is explained using this unified model. A special case of the unified model, with contact line pinning, absent, predicts beta(m,parallel to) with an average error of 6.3%.

A Novel Approach for Multispectral Satellite Image Classification Based on the Bat Algorithm

Among the multiple advantages and applications of remote sensing, one of the most important uses is to solve the problem of crop classification, i.e., differentiating between various crop types. Satellite images are a reliable source for investigating the temporal changes in crop cultivated areas. In this letter, we propose a novel bat algorithm (BA)-based clustering approach for solving crop type classification problems using a multispectral satellite image. The proposed partitional clustering algorithm is used to extract information in the form of optimal cluster centers from training samples. The extracted cluster centers are then validated on test samples. A real-time multispectral satellite image and one benchmark data set from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) repository are used to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed algorithm. The performance of the BA is compared with two other nature-inspired metaheuristic techniques, namely, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization. The performance is also compared with the existing hybrid approach such as the BA with K-means. From the results obtained, it can be concluded that the BA can be successfully applied to solve crop type classification problems.

FIVDL: Fingerprint Image Verification using Dictionary Learning

Fingerprints are used for identification in forensics and are classified into Manual and Automatic. Automatic fingerprint identification system is classified into Latent and Exemplar. A novel Exemplar technique of Fingerprint Image Verification using Dictionary Learning (FIVDL) is proposed to improve the performance of low quality fingerprints, where Dictionary learning method reduces the time complexity by using block processing instead of pixel processing. The dynamic range of an image is adjusted by using Successive Mean Quantization Transform (SMQT) technique and the frequency domain noise is reduced using spectral frequency Histogram Equalization. Then, an adaptive nonlinear dynamic range adjustment technique is utilized to determine the local spectral features on corresponding fingerprint ridge frequency and orientation. The dictionary is constructed using spatial fundamental frequency that is determined from the spectral features. These dictionaries help in removing the spurious noise present in fingerprints and reduce the time complexity by using block processing instead of pixel processing. Further, dictionaries are used to reconstruct the image for matching. The proposed FIVDL is verified on FVC database sets and Experimental result shows an improvement over the state-of-the-art techniques. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

IMAGE DENOISING USING OPTIMALLY WEIGHTED BILATERAL FILTERS: A SURE AND FAST APPROACH

The bilateral filter is known to be quite effective in denoising images corrupted with small dosages of additive Gaussian noise. The denoising performance of the filter, however, is known to degrade quickly with the increase in noise level. Several adaptations of the filter have been proposed in the literature to address this shortcoming, but often at a substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we report a simple pre-processing step that can substantially improve the denoising performance of the bilateral filter, at almost no additional cost. The modified filter is designed to be robust at large noise levels, and often tends to perform poorly below a certain noise threshold. To get the best of the original and the modified filter, we propose to combine them in a weighted fashion, where the weights are chosen to minimize (a surrogate of) the oracle mean-squared-error (MSE). The optimally-weighted filter is thus guaranteed to perform better than either of the component filters in terms of the MSE, at all noise levels. We also provide a fast algorithm for the weighted filtering. Visual and quantitative denoising results on standard test images are reported which demonstrate that the improvement over the original filter is significant both visually and in terms of PSNR. Moreover, the denoising performance of the optimally-weighted bilateral filter is competitive with the computation-intensive non-local means filter.

IMAGE DENOISING IN MULTIPLICATIVE NOISE

We address the problem of denoising images corrupted by multiplicative noise. The noise is assumed to follow a Gamma distribution. Compared with additive noise distortion, the effect of multiplicative noise on the visual quality of images is quite severe. We consider the mean-square error (MSE) cost function and derive an expression for an unbiased estimate of the MSE. The resulting multiplicative noise unbiased risk estimator is referred to as MURE. The denoising operation is performed in the wavelet domain by considering the image-domain MURE. The parameters of the denoising function (typically, a shrinkage of wavelet coefficients) are optimized for by minimizing MURE. We show that MURE is accurate and close to the oracle MSE. This makes MURE-based image denoising reliable and on par with oracle-MSE-based estimates. Analogous to the other popular risk estimation approaches developed for additive, Poisson, and chi-squared noise degradations, the proposed approach does not assume any prior on the underlying noise-free image. We report denoising results for various noise levels and show that the quality of denoising obtained is on par with the oracle result and better than that obtained using some state-of-the-art denoisers.