Instantaneous measurement of surface roughness spectra using white-light scattering projected on a spectrometer.

Following on from previous studies on motionless scatterometers based on the use of white light, we propose a new, to the best of our knowledge, experiment of white-light scattering that should overtake the previous ones in most situations. The setup is very simple as it requires only a broadband illumination source and a spectrometer to analyze light scattering at a unique direction. After introducing the principle of the instrument, roughness spectra are extracted for different samples, and the consistency of results is validated at the intersection of bandwidths. The technique will be of great use for samples that cannot be moved.

Immediate and one-point roughness measurements using spectrally shaped light.

Capitalizing on a previous theoretical paper, we propose a novel approach, to our knowledge, that is different from the usual scattering measurements, one that is free of any mechanical movement or scanning. Scattering is measured along a single direction. Wide-band illumination with a properly chosen wavelength spectrum makes the signal proportional to the sample roughness, or to the higher-order roughness moments. Spectral shaping is carried out with gratings and a spatial light modulator. We validate the technique by cross-checking with a classical angle-resolved scattering set-up. Though the bandwidth is reduced, this white light technique may be of key interest for on-line measurements, large components that cannot be displaced, or other parts that do not allow mechanical movement around them.

Convergence Rates of Forward-Douglas-Rachford Splitting Method.

Over the past decades, operator splitting methods have become ubiquitous for non-smooth optimization owing to their simplicity and efficiency. In this paper, we consider the Forward-Douglas-Rachford splitting method and study both global and local convergence rates of this method. For the global rate, we establish a sublinear convergence rate in terms of a Bregman divergence suitably designed for the objective function. Moreover, when specializing to the Forward-Backward splitting, we prove a stronger convergence rate result for the objective function value. Then locally, based on the assumption that the non-smooth part of the optimization problem is partly smooth, we establish local linear convergence of the method. More precisely, we show that the sequence generated by Forward-Douglas-Rachford first (i) identifies a smooth manifold in a finite number of iteration and then (ii) enters a local linear convergence regime, which is for instance characterized in terms of the structure of the underlying active smooth manifold. To exemplify the usefulness of the obtained result, we consider several concrete numerical experiments arising from applicative fields including, for instance, signal/image processing, inverse problems and machine learning.

Total variation projection with first order schemes.

This article proposes a new algorithm to compute the projection on the set of images whose total variation is bounded by a constant. The projection is computed through a dual formulation that is solved by first order non-smooth optimization methods. This yields an iterative algorithm that applies iterative soft thresholding to the dual vector field, and for which we establish convergence rate on the primal iterates. This projection algorithm can then be used as a building block in a variety of applications such as solving inverse problems under a total variation constraint, or for texture synthesis. Numerical results are reported to illustrate the usefulness and potential applicability of our TV projection algorithm on various examples including denoising, texture synthesis, inpainting, deconvolution and tomography problems. We also show that our projection algorithm competes favorably with state-of-the-art TV projection methods in terms of convergence speed.

A proximal iteration for deconvolving Poisson noisy images using sparse representations.

We propose an image deconvolution algorithm when the data is contaminated by Poisson noise. The image to restore is assumed to be sparsely represented in a dictionary of waveforms such as the wavelet or curvelet transforms. Our key contributions are as follows. First, we handle the Poisson noise properly by using the Anscombe variance stabilizing transform leading to a nonlinear degradation equation with additive Gaussian noise. Second, the deconvolution problem is formulated as the minimization of a convex functional with a data-fidelity term reflecting the noise properties, and a nonsmooth sparsity-promoting penalty over the image representation coefficients (e.g., l(1) -norm). An additional term is also included in the functional to ensure positivity of the restored image. Third, a fast iterative forward-backward splitting algorithm is proposed to solve the minimization problem. We derive existence and uniqueness conditions of the solution, and establish convergence of the iterative algorithm. Finally, a GCV-based model selection procedure is proposed to objectively select the regularization parameter. Experimental results are carried out to show the striking benefits gained from taking into account the Poisson statistics of the noise. These results also suggest that using sparse-domain regularization may be tractable in many deconvolution applications with Poisson noise such as astronomy and microscopy.

Wavelets, ridgelets, and curvelets for Poisson noise removal.

In order to denoise Poisson count data, we introduce a variance stabilizing transform (VST) applied on a filtered discrete Poisson process, yielding a near Gaussian process with asymptotic constant variance. This new transform, which can be deemed as an extension of the Anscombe transform to filtered data, is simple, fast, and efficient in (very) low-count situations. We combine this VST with the filter banks of wavelets, ridgelets and curvelets, leading to multiscale VSTs (MS-VSTs) and nonlinear decomposition schemes. By doing so, the noise-contaminated coefficients of these MS-VST-modified transforms are asymptotically normally distributed with known variances. A classical hypothesis-testing framework is adopted to detect the significant coefficients, and a sparsity-driven iterative scheme reconstructs properly the final estimate. A range of examples show the power of this MS-VST approach for recovering important structures of various morphologies in (very) low-count images. These results also demonstrate that the MS-VST approach is competitive relative to many existing denoising methods.

Sparsity and morphological diversity in blind source separation.

Over the last few years, the development of multichannel sensors motivated interest in methods for the coherent processing of multivariate data. Some specific issues have already been addressed as testified by the wide literature on the so-caIled blind source separation (BSS) problem. In this context, as clearly emphasized by previous work, it is fundamental that the sources to be retrieved present some quantitatively measurable diversity. Recently, sparsity and morphological diversity have emergedas a novel and effective source of diversity for BSS. Here, we give some new and essential insights into the use of sparsity in source separation, and we outline the essential role of morphological diversity as being a source of diversity or contrast between the sources. This paper introduces a new BSS method coined generalized morphological component analysis (GMCA) that takes advantages of both morphological diversity and sparsity, using recent sparse overcomplete or redundant signal representations. GMCA is a fast and efficient BSS method. We present arguments and a discussion supporting the convergence of the GMCA algorithm. Numerical results in multivariate image and signal processing are given illustrating the good performance of GMCA and its robustness to noise.

Morphological component analysis: an adaptive thresholding strategy.

In a recent paper, a method called morphological component analysis (MCA) has been proposed to separate the texture from the natural part in images. MCA relies on an iterative thresholding algorithm, using a threshold which decreases linearly towards zero along the iterations. This paper shows how the MCA convergence can be drastically improved using the mutual incoherence of the dictionaries associated to the different components. This modified MCA algorithm is then compared to basis pursuit, and experiments show that MCA and BP solutions are similar in terms of sparsity, as measured by the l1 norm, but MCA is much faster and gives us the possibility of handling large scale data sets.

The undecimated wavelet decomposition and its reconstruction.

This paper describes the undecimated wavelet transform and its reconstruction. In the first part, we show the relation between two well known undecimated wavelet transforms, the standard undecimated wavelet transform and the isotropic undecimated wavelet transform. Then we present new filter banks specially designed for undecimated wavelet decompositions which have some useful properties such as being robust to ringing artifacts which appear generally in wavelet-based denoising methods. A range of examples illustrates the results.

Permutation testing of orthogonal factorial effects in a language-processing experiment using fMRI.

The block-paradigm of the Functional Image Analysis Contest (FIAC) dataset was analysed with the Brain Activation and Morphological Mapping software. Permutation methods in the wavelet domain were used for inference on cluster-based test statistics of orthogonal contrasts relevant to the factorial design of the study, namely: the average response across all active blocks, the main effect of speaker, the main effect of sentence, and the interaction between sentence and speaker. Extensive activation was seen with all these contrasts. In particular, different vs. same-speaker blocks produced elevated activation in bilateral regions of the superior temporal lobe and repetition suppression for linguistic materials (same vs. different-sentence blocks) in left inferior frontal regions. These are regions previously reported in the literature. Additional regions were detected in this study, perhaps due to the enhanced sensitivity of the methodology. Within-block sentence suppression was tested post-hoc by regression of an exponential decay model onto the extracted time series from the left inferior frontal gyrus, but no strong evidence of such an effect was found. The significance levels set for the activation maps are P-values at which we expect <1 false-positive cluster per image. Nominal type I error control was verified by empirical testing of a test statistic corresponding to a randomly ordered design matrix. The small size of the BOLD effect necessitates sensitive methods of detection of brain activation. Permutation methods permit the necessary flexibility to develop novel test statistics to meet this challenge.

Fractional Gaussian noise, functional MRI and Alzheimer's disease.

Fractional Gaussian noise (fGn) provides a parsimonious model for stationary increments of a self-similar process parameterised by the Hurst exponent, H, and variance, sigma2. Fractional Gaussian noise with H < 0.5 demonstrates negatively autocorrelated or antipersistent behaviour; fGn with H > 0.5 demonstrates 1/f, long memory or persistent behaviour; and the special case of fGn with H = 0.5 corresponds to classical Gaussian white noise. We comparatively evaluate four possible estimators of fGn parameters, one method implemented in the time domain and three in the wavelet domain. We show that a wavelet-based maximum likelihood (ML) estimator yields the most efficient estimates of H and sigma2 in simulated fGn with 0 < H < 1. Applying this estimator to fMRI data acquired in the "resting" state from healthy young and older volunteers, we show empirically that fGn provides an accommodating model for diverse species of fMRI noise, assuming adequate preprocessing to correct effects of head movement, and that voxels with H > 0.5 tend to be concentrated in cortex whereas voxels with H < 0.5 are more frequently located in ventricles and sulcal CSF. The wavelet-ML estimator can be generalised to estimate the parameter vector beta for general linear modelling (GLM) of a physiological response to experimental stimulation and we demonstrate nominal type I error control in multiple testing of beta, divided by its standard error, in simulated and biological data under the null hypothesis beta = 0. We illustrate these methods principally by showing that there are significant differences between patients with early Alzheimer's disease (AD) and age-matched comparison subjects in the persistence of fGn in the medial and lateral temporal lobes, insula, dorsal cingulate/medial premotor cortex, and left pre- and postcentral gyrus: patients with AD had greater persistence of resting fMRI noise (larger H) in these regions. Comparable abnormalities in the AD patients were also identified by a permutation test of local differences in the first-order autoregression AR(1) coefficient, which was significantly more positive in patients. However, we found that the Hurst exponent provided a more sensitive metric than the AR(1) coefficient to detect these differences, perhaps because neurophysiological changes in early AD are naturally better described in terms of abnormal salience of long memory dynamics than a change in the strength of association between immediately consecutive time points. We conclude that parsimonious mapping of fMRI noise properties in terms of fGn parameters efficiently estimated in the wavelet domain is feasible and can enhance insight into the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's disease.

Analytical form for a Bayesian wavelet estimator of images using the Bessel K form densities.

A novel Bayesian nonparametric estimator in the Wavelet domain is presented. In this approach, a prior model is imposed on the wavelet coefficients designed to capture the sparseness of the wavelet expansion. Seeking probability models for the marginal densities of the wavelet coefficients, the new family of Bessel K forms (BKF) densities are shown to fit very well to the observed histograms. Exploiting this prior, we designed a Bayesian nonlinear denoiser and we derived a closed form for its expression. We then compared it to other priors that have been introduced in the literature, such as the generalized Gaussian density (GGD) or the alpha-stable models, where no analytical form is available for the corresponding Bayesian denoisers. Specifically, the BKF model turns out to be a good compromise between these two extreme cases (hyperbolic tails for the alpha-stable and exponential tails for the GGD). Moreover, we demonstrate a high degree of match between observed and estimated prior densities using the BKF model. Finally, a comparative study is carried out to show the effectiveness of our denoiser which clearly outperforms the classical shrinkage or thresholding wavelet-based techniques.

Wavelets and functional magnetic resonance imaging of the human brain.

The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is widely used for multiresolution analysis and decorrelation or "whitening" of nonstationary time series and spatial processes. Wavelets are naturally appropriate for analysis of biological data, such as functional magnetic resonance images of the human brain, which often demonstrate scale invariant or fractal properties. We provide a brief formal introduction to key properties of the DWT and review the growing literature on its application to fMRI. We focus on three applications in particular: (i) wavelet coefficient resampling or "wavestrapping" of 1-D time series, 2- to 3-D spatial maps and 4-D spatiotemporal processes; (ii) wavelet-based estimators for signal and noise parameters of time series regression models assuming the errors are fractional Gaussian noise (fGn); and (iii) wavelet shrinkage in frequentist and Bayesian frameworks to support multiresolution hypothesis testing on spatially extended statistic maps. We conclude that the wavelet domain is a rich source of new concepts and techniques to enhance the power of statistical analysis of human fMRI data.

Wavelets and statistical analysis of functional magnetic resonance images of the human brain.

Wavelets provide an orthonormal basis for multiresolution analysis and decorrelation or 'whitening' of nonstationary time series and spatial processes. Wavelets are particularly well suited to analysis of biological signals and images, such as human brain imaging data, which often have fractal or scale-invariant properties. We briefly define some key properties of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and review its applications to statistical analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. We focus on time series resampling by 'wavestrapping' of wavelet coefficients, methods for efficient linear model estimation in the wavelet domain, and wavelet-based methods for multiple hypothesis testing, all of which are somewhat simplified by the decorrelating property of the DWT.