Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microspectroscopy is a powerful tool for label-free cell imaging thanks to its ability to acquire a rich amount of information. An important family of operations applied to such data is multivariate curve resolution (MCR). It aims to find main components of a dataset and compute their spectra and concentrations in each pixel. Recently, autoencoders began to be studied to accomplish MCR with dense and convolutional models. However, many questions, like the results variability or the reconstruction metric, remain open and applications are limited to hyperspectral imaging. In this article, we present a nonlinear convolutional encoder combined with a linear decoder to apply MCR to CARS microspectroscopy. We conclude with a study of the result variability induced by the encoder initialization.
We propose two automatic parameter tuning methods for Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithms that use CNN denoisers. We focus on linear inverse problems and propose an iterative algorithm to calculate generalized cross-validation (GCV) and Stein’s unbiased risk estimator (SURE) functions for a half-quadratic splitting-based PnP (PnP-HQS) algorithm that uses a state-of- the-art CNN denoiser. The proposed methods leverage forward mode automatic differentiation to calculate the GCV and SURE functions and tune the parameters of a PnP-HQS algorithm automatically by minimizing the GCV and SURE functions using grid search. Because linear inverse problems appear frequently in computational imaging, the proposed methods can be applied in various domains. Furthermore, because the proposed methods rely on GCV and SURE functions, they do not require access to the ground truth image and do not require collecting an additional training dataset, which is highly desirable for imaging applications for which acquiring data is costly and time-consuming. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methods on deblurring and MRI experiments and show that the GCV-based proposed method achieves comparable performance to that of the oracle tuning method that adjusts the parameters by maximizing the structural similarity index between the ground truth image and the output of the PnP algorithm. We also show that the SURE-based proposed method often leads to worse performance compared to the GCV-based proposed method.
Ultrasound elasticity images, which enable the visualization of quantitative maps of tissue stiffness, can be reconstructed by solving an inverse problem. Classical model-based approaches for ultrasound elastography use deterministic finite element methods (FEMs) to incorporate the governing physical laws leading to poor performance in low SNR conditions. Moreover, these approaches utilize approximate linear forward models discretized by FEMs to describe the underlying physics governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). To achieve highly accurate stiffness images, it is essential to compensate the error induced by noisy measurements and inaccurate forward models. In this regard, we propose a joint model-based and learning-based framework for estimating the elasticity distribution by solving a regularized optimization problem. To address noise, we introduce a statistical representation of the imaging system, which incorporates the noise statistics as a signal-dependent correlated noise model. Moreover, in order to compensate for the model errors, we introduce an explicit data-driven correction model, which can be integrated with any regularization term. This constrained optimization problem is solved using fixed-point gradient descent where the analytical gradient of the inaccurate data-fidelity term is corrected using a neural network, while regularization is achieved by data-driven unrolled regularization by denoising (RED). Both networks are jointly trained in an end-to-end manner.
A lightweight learning-based exposure bracketing strategy is proposed in this paper for high dynamic range (HDR) imaging without access to camera RAW. Some low-cost, power-efficient cameras, such as webcams, video surveillance cameras, sport cameras, mid-tier cellphone cameras, and navigation cameras on robots, can only provide access to 8-bit low dynamic range (LDR) images. Exposure fusion is a classical approach to capture HDR scenes by fusing images taken with different exposures into a 8-bit tone-mapped HDR image. A key question is what the optimal set of exposure settings are to cover the scene dynamic range and achieve a desirable tone. The proposed lightweight neural network predicts these exposure settings for a 3-shot exposure bracketing, given the input irradiance information from 1) the histograms of an auto-exposure LDR preview image, and 2) the maximum and minimum levels of the scene irradiance. Without the processing of the preview image streams, and the circuitous route of first estimating the scene HDR irradiance and then tone-mapping to 8-bit images, the proposed method gives a more practical HDR enhancement for real-time and on-device applications. Experiments on a number of challenging images reveal the advantages of our method in comparison with other state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively.
A novel iterative linear classification algorithm is developed from a maximum likelihood (ML) linear classifier. The main contribution of this paper is the discovery that a well-known maximum likelihood linear classifier with regularization is the solution to a contraction mapping for an acceptable range of values of the regularization parameter. Hence, a novel iterative scheme is proposed that converges to a fixed point, the globally optimum solution. To the best of our knowledge, this formulation has not been discovered before. Furthermore, the proposed iterative solution converges to a fixed point at a rate faster than the traditional gradient descent technique. The performance of the proposed iterative solution is compared to conventional gradient descent methods on linear and non-linearly separable data in terms of both convergence speed and overall classification performance.
