Robust classification of blurred imagery.

In this paper, we present two novel approaches for the classification of blurry images. It is assumed that the blur is linear and space invariant, but that the exact blurring function is unknown. The proposed fusion-based approaches attempt to perform the simultaneous tasks of blind image restoration and classification. We call such a problem blind image fusion. The techniques are implemented using the nonnegativity and support constraints recursive inverse filtering (NAS-RIF) algorithm for blind image restoration and the Markov random field (RIRF)-based fusion method for classification by Schistad-Solberg et al. Simulation results on synthetic and real photographic data demonstrate the potential of the approaches. The algorithms are compared with one another and to situations in which blind blur removal is not attempted.

A perceptually lossless, model-based, texture compression technique.

In natural scenes, still images as well as sequences, backgrounds, and objects' surfaces usually have a textural structure. Therefore, in order to efficiently code images it is crucial to investigate the texture compression problem. In this paper, a perceptually lossless, synthesis-by-analysis texture coding method is presented. The proposed approach is model based; the parameters of the model consist of a binary excitation signal and the parsimonious representation of the reconstruction filter. The estimated parameters, which allow to one synthesize, at the decoder site, a texture that is perceptually indistinguishable from the original one, are then compressed using a lossless strategy, which is based on a fast binary wavelet transformation specifically tailored to binary images. The proposed method leads to very good perceptual results superior to those of existing techniques.

Improved robust watermarking through attack characterization.

In this paper, we propose an approach to improve the performance of a broad class of watermarking schemes through attack characterization. Robust and reference watermarks are both embedded into a signal. The reference watermark is used to characterize any modifications of the resulting marked signal, so that the robust watermark can be more reliably extracted. Analysis and simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.