Regularized estimation of fractal attributes by convex minimization for texture segmentation: joint variational formulations, fast proximal algorithms and unsupervised selection of regularization para

In this doctoral thesis several scale-free texture segmentation procedures based on two fractal attributes, the H?lder exponent, measuring the local regularity of a texture, and local variance, are proposed.A piecewise homogeneous fractal texture model is built, along with a synthesis procedure, providing images composed of the aggregation of fractal texture patches with known attributes and segmentation. This synthesis procedure is used to evaluate the proposed methods performance.A first method, based on the Total Variation regularization of a noisy estimate of local regularity, is illustrated and refined thanks to a post-processing step consisting in an iterative thresholding and resulting in a segmentation.After evidencing the limitations of this first approach, deux segmentation methods, with either “free” or “co-located” contours, are built, taking in account jointly the local regularity and the local variance.These two procedures are formulated as convex nonsmooth functional minimization problems.We show that the two functionals, with “free” and “co-located” penalizations, are both strongly-convex. and compute their respective strong convexity moduli.Several minimization schemes are derived, and their convergence speed are compared.The segmentation performance of the different methods are evaluated over a large amount of synthetic data in configurations of increasing difficulty, as well as on real world images, and compared to state-of-the-art procedures, including convolutional neural networks.An application for the segmentation of multiphasic flow through a porous medium experiment images is presented.Finally, a strategy for automated selection of the hyperparameters of the “free” and “co-located” functionals is built, inspired from the SURE estimator of the quadratic risk.