Secure Transmission of Compressed Medical Image Sequences on Communication Networks Using Motion Vector Watermarking

Medical imaging plays a key role within modern hospital management systems for diagnostic purposes.Compression methodologies are extensively employed to mitigate storage demands and enhance transmission speed,all while upholding image quality.Moreover,an increasing number of hospitals are embracing cloud computing for patient data storage,necessitating meticulous scrutiny of server security and privacy protocols.Nevertheless,considering the widespread availability of multimedia tools,the preservation of digital data integrity surpasses the significance of compression alone.In response to this concern,we propose a secure storage and transmission solution for compressed medical image sequences,such as ultrasound images,utilizing a motion vector watermarking scheme.The watermark is generated employing an error-correcting code known as Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem(BCH)and is subsequently embedded into the compressed sequence via block-based motion vectors.In the process of watermark embedding,motion vectors are selected based on their magnitude and phase angle.When embedding watermarks,no specific spatial area,such as a region of interest(ROI),is used in the images.The embedding of watermark bits is dependent on motion vectors.Although reversible watermarking allows the restoration of the original image sequences,we use the irreversible watermarking method.The reason for this is that the use of reversible watermarks may impede the claims of ownership and legal rights.The restoration of original data or images may call into question ownership or other legal claims.The peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR)and structural similarity index(SSIM)serve as metrics for evaluating the watermarked image quality.Across all images,the PSNR value exceeds 46 dB,and the SSIM value exceeds 0.92.Experimental results substantiate the efficacy of the proposed technique in preserving data integrity.

Multi-focus image fusion based on block matching in 3D transform domain

Fusion methods based on multi-scale transforms have become the mainstream of the pixel-level image fusion. However,most of these methods cannot fully exploit spatial domain information of source images, which lead to the degradation of image.This paper presents a fusion framework based on block-matching and 3D(BM3D) multi-scale transform. The algorithm first divides the image into different blocks and groups these 2D image blocks into 3D arrays by their similarity. Then it uses a 3D transform which consists of a 2D multi-scale and a 1D transform to transfer the arrays into transform coefficients, and then the obtained low-and high-coefficients are fused by different fusion rules. The final fused image is obtained from a series of fused 3D image block groups after the inverse transform by using an aggregation process. In the experimental part, we comparatively analyze some existing algorithms and the using of different transforms, e.g. non-subsampled Contourlet transform(NSCT), non-subsampled Shearlet transform(NSST), in the 3D transform step. Experimental results show that the proposed fusion framework can not only improve subjective visual effect, but also obtain better objective evaluation criteria than state-of-the-art methods.

Improved block matching approach to fast disparity estimation

An improved block matching approach to fast disparity estimation in machine vision applications is proposed, where the matching criterion is the sum of the absolute difference（SAD）.By evaluating the lower bounds, which become increasingly tighter for the matching criteria, the method tries to successively terminate unnecessary computations of the matching criteria between the reference block in one image and the ineligible candidate blocks in another image.It also eliminates the ineligible blocks as early as possible, while ensuring the optimal disparity of each pixel.Also, the proposed method can further speed up the elimination of ineligible candidate blocks by efficiently using the continuous constraint of disparity to predict the initial disparity of each pixel.The performance of the new algorithm is evaluated by carrying out a theoretical analysis, and by comparing its performance with the disparity estimation method based on the standard block matching.Simulated results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a computational cost reduction of over 50.5% in comparision with the standard block matching method.

Fast inter-mode decision method based on best matching block for H.264 encoding

In H.264 encoder, all possible coding modes should be checked to choose the most appropriate mode for every macroblock, which adds a heavy computation burden to the encoder. In this paper, a fast inter-mode decision method is presented to reduce computation complexity of an H.264 encoder. By detecting the best matching block （BMB） before transform and quantization, some coding modes can be skipped and the corresponding encoding steps can be omitted for these BMBs. Meanwhile this method can also be used to detect all-zero blocks. The experimental results show that this method achieves consistently significant reduction of encoding time while keeping almost the same rate-distortion performance.

BIMATCHING DESIGNS

A collection of k-matchings of bipartite graph Kn,n with the property thatevery pair of independent edges lies in exactly λ of the k-matchings is called aBIMATCH(n,k,λ)-design. Existences and constructions for various BIMATCH (n,k,λ)designs are given.

Automatic detection and removal of static shadows

In case of complex textures,existing static shadow detection and removal algorithms are prone to false detection of the pixels.To solve this problem,a static shadow detection and removal algorithm based on support vector machine(SVM)and region sub-block matching is proposed.Firstly,the original image is segmented into several superpixels,and these superpixels are clustered using mean-shift clustering algorithm in the superpixel sets.Secondly,these features such as color,texture,brightness,intensity and similarity of each area are extracted.These features are used as input of SVM to obtain shadow binary images through training in non-operational state.Thirdly,soft matting is used to smooth the boundary of shadow binary graph.Finally,after finding the best matching sub-block for shadow sub-block in the illumination region based on regional covariance feature and spatial distance,the shadow weighted average factor is introduced to partially correct the sub-block,and the light recovery operator is used to partially light the sub-block.The experimental results show the number of false detection of the pixels is reduced.In addition,it can remove shadows effectively for the image with rich textures and uneven shadows and make a natural transition at the boundary between shadow and light.

Multi-toning Image Adjustment

Due to the different lighting environments or other reasons, the pixel colors may be quite different in one image which causes distinct visual discontinuities. It makes the analysis and processing of such an image more difficult and sometime impossible. In this paper, a unified multi-toning image adjustment method is proposed to solve this problem. First, a novel unsupervised clustering method was proposed to partition the source and the target image into a certain number of subsets with similar color statistics. By matching the texture characteristics and luminance distribution between the blocks, it can create optimized correspondence. Then, the color information was transferred from the matched pixels in the source blocks to the target ones. Graph cut method was used to optimize the seams between different subsets in the final step. This method can automatically perform color adjustment of a multi-toning image. It is simple and efficient. Various results show the validity of this method.

Image Restoration Using Hybrid Features Improvement on Morphological Component Analysis

Images are generally corrupted by impulse noise during acquisition and transmission.Noise deteriorates the quality of images.To remove corruption noise,we propose a hybrid approach to restoring a random noisecorrupted image,including a block matching 3D(BM3D)method,an adaptive non-local mean(ANLM)scheme,and the K-singular value decomposition(K-SVD)algorithm.In the proposed method,we employ the morphological component analysis(MCA)to decompose an image into the texture,structure,and edge parts.Then,the BM3D method,ANLM scheme,and K-SVD algorithm are utilized to eliminate noise in the texture,structure,and edge parts of the image,respectively.Experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively remove interference random noise in different parts;meanwhile,the deteriorated image is able to be reconstructed well.

H.264 MOTION ESTIMATION ALGORITHM BASED ON VIDEO SEQUENCES ACTIVITY

Motion estimation is an important part of H.264/AVC encoding progress, with high com- putational complexity. Therefore, it is quite necessary to find a fast motion estimation algorithm for real-time applications. The algorithm proposed in this letter adjudges the macroblocks activity degree first; then classifies different video sequences, and applies different search strategies according to the result. Experiments show that this method obtains almost the same video quality with the Full Search (FS) algorithm but with reduced more than 95% computation cost.

NOVEL TWO-LAYER MOTION ESTIMATION FOR VIDEO CODING

In this paper, we proposed a novel Two-layer Motion Estimation(TME) which searches motion vectors on two layers with partial distortion measures in order to reduce the overwhelming computational complexity of Motion Estimation(ME) in video coding. A layer is an image which is derived from the reference frame such that the sum of a block of pixels in the reference frame determines the point of a layer. It has been noticed on different video sequences that many motion vectors on the layers are the same as those searched on the reference frame. The proposed TME performs a coarse search on the first layer to identify the small region in which the best candidate block is likely to be positioned and then perform local refined search on the next layer to pick the best candidate block in the located small area. The key feature of TME is its flexibility of mixing with any fast search algorithm. Experimental results on a wide variety of video sequences show that the proposed algorithm has achieved both fast speed and good motion prediction quality when compared to well known as well as the state-of-the-art fast block matching algorithms.

A Two-Stage Algorithm of High Resolution Image Alignment for Mobile Applications

Global motion estimation (GME) algorithms are widely applied to computer vision and video processing. In the previous works, the image resolutions are usually low for the real-time requirement (e.g. video stabilization). However, in some mobile devices applications (e.g. image sequence panoramic stitching), the high resolution is necessary to obtain satisfactory quality of panoramic image. However, the computational cost will become too expensive to be suitable for the low power consumption requirement of mobile device. The full search algorithm can obtain the global minimum with extremely computational cost, while the typical fast algorithms may suffer from the local minimum problem. This paper proposed a fast algorithm to deal with 2560 × 1920 high-resolution (HR) image sequences. The proposed method estimates the motion vector by a two-level coarse-to-fine scheme which only exploits sparse reference blocks (25 blocks in this paper) in each level to determine the global motion vector, thus the computational costs are significantly decreased. In order to increase the effective search range and robustness, the predictive motion vector (PMV) technique is used in this work. By the comparisons of computational complexity, the proposed algorithm costs less addition operations than the typical Three-Step Search algorithm (TSS) for estimating the global motion of the HR images without the local minimum problem. The quantitative evaluations show that our method is comparable to the full search algorithm (FSA) which is considered to be the golden baseline.

3D Filtering by Block Matching and Convolutional Neural Network for Image Denoising

Block matching based 3D filtering methods have achieved great success in image denoising tasks. However the manually set filtering operation could not well describe a good model to transform noisy images to clean images. In this paper, we introduce convolutional neural network （CNN） for the 3D filtering step to learn a well fitted model for denoising. With a trainable model, prior knowledge is utilized for better mapping from noisy images to clean images. This block matching and CNN joint model （BMCNN） could denoise images with different sizes and different noise intensity well, especially images with high noise levels. The experimental results demonstrate that among all competing methods, this method achieves the highest peak signal to noise ratio （PSNR） when denoising images with high noise levels （σ 〉 40）, and the best visual quality when denoising images with all the tested noise levels.

局部均值噪声估计的盲3维滤波降噪算法

目的图像在获取和传输的过程中很容易受到噪声的干扰,图像降噪作为众多图像处理系统的预处理模块在过去数十年中得到了广泛的研究。在已提出的降噪算法中,往往采用加性高斯白噪声模型AWGN(additive white Gaussian noise)为噪声建模,噪声水平(严重程度)由方差参数控制。经典的BM3D 3维滤波算法属于非盲降噪(non-blind denoising algorithm)算法,在实际使用中需要由人工评估图像噪声水平并设置参数,存在着噪声评估值随机性大而导致无法获得最佳降噪效果的问题。为此,提出了一种新的局部均值噪声估计(LME)算法并作为BM3D算法的前置预处理模块。方法本文专注于利用基于自然统计规律(NSS)的图像质量感知特征和局部均值估计技术构建图像噪声水平预测器,并通过它高效地获得噪声图像中准确的噪声水平值。关于自然场景统计方面的研究表明,无失真的自然场景图像在空域或者频率域上具有显著的统计规律,一旦受到噪声干扰会产生规律性的偏移,可以提取这些特征值作为反映图像质量好坏的图像质量感知特征。另外,局部均值估计因其简单而高效率的预测特性被采用。具体实现上,在具有广泛代表性且未受噪声干扰图像集合上添加不同噪声水平的高斯噪声构建失真图像集合,然后利用小波变换对这些失真图像进行不同尺度和不同方向的分解,再用广义高斯分布模型(GGD)提取子带滤波系数的统计信息构成描述图像失真程度的特征矢量,最后用每幅失真图像上所提取的特征矢量及对其所施加的高斯噪声水平值构成了失真特征矢量库。在降噪阶段,用相同的特征提取方法提取待降噪的图像的特征矢量并在失真特征矢量库中检索出与之类似的若干特征矢量及它们所对应的噪声水平值,然后用局部均值法估计出待降噪图像中高斯噪声大小作为经典BM3D算法的输入参数。结果改进后的BM3D算法转换为盲降噪算法,称为BM3D-LME(block-matching and 3D filtering based on local means estimation)算法。准确的噪声估计对于诸如图像降噪,图像超分辨率和图像分割等图像处理任务非常重要。已经验证了所提出噪声水平估计算法的准确性、鲁棒性和有效性。结论相对人工进行噪声估计,LME算法能够准确、快速地估算出任意待降噪图像中的噪声大小。配合BM3D算法使用后,有效提高了它的实际降噪效果并扩大它的应用范围。

Improved image denoising via RAISR with fewer filters

In recent years,accurate Gaussian noise removal has attracted considerable attention for mobile applications,as in smart phones.Accurate conventional denoising methods have the potential ability to improve denoising performance with no additional time.Therefore,we propose a rapid post-processing method for Gaussian noise removal in this paper.Block matching and 3D filtering and weighted nuclear norm minimization are utilized to suppress noise.Although these nonlocal image denoising methods have quantitatively high performance,some fine image details are lacking due to the loss of high frequency information.To tackle this problem,an improvement to the pioneering RAISR approach(rapid and accurate image super-resolution),is applied to rapidly post-process the denoised image.It gives performance comparable to state-of-the-art super-resolution techniques at low computational cost,preserving important image structures well.Our modification is to reduce the hash classes for the patches extracted from the denoised image and the pixels from the ground truth to 18 filters by two improvements:geometric conversion and reduction of the strength classes.In addition,following RAISR,the census transform is exploited by blending the image processed by noise removal methods with the filtered one to achieve artifact-free results.Experimental results demonstrate that higher quality and more pleasant visual results can be achieved than by other methods,efficiently and with low memory requirements.