This work is concerned with two image-processing problems, image deconvolution with incomplete observations and data fusion of spectral images, and with some of the algorithms that are used to solve these and related problems. In image-deconvolution problems, the diagonalization of the blurring operator by means of the discrete Fourier transform usually yields very large speedups. When there are incomplete observations (e.g., in the case of unknown boundaries), standard deconvolution techniques normally involve non-diagonalizable operators, resulting in rather slow methods, or, otherwise, use inexact convolution models, resulting in the occurrence of artifacts in the enhanced images. We propose a new deconvolution framework for images with incomplete observations that allows one to work with diagonalizable convolution operators, and therefore is very fast. The framework is also an efficient, high-quality alternative to existing methods of dealing with the image boundaries, such as edge ...

In this doctoral thesis several scale-free texture segmentation procedures based on two fractal attributes, the Hölder 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 ...

In the thesis, various aspects of deconvolution of ultrasonic pulse-echo signals in nondestructive testing are treated. The deconvolution problem is formulated as estimation of a reflection sequence which is the impulse characteristic of the inspected object and the estimation is performed using either maximum a posteriori (MAP) or linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimators. A multivariable model is proposed for a certain multiple transducer setup allowing for frequency diversity, thereby improving the estimation accuracy. Using the MAP estimator three different material types were treated, with varying amount of sparsity in the reflection sequences. The Gaussian distribution is used for modelling materials containing a large number of small scatters. The Bernoulli--Gaussian distribution is used for sparse data obtained from layered structures and a genetic algorithm approach is proposed for optimizing the corresponding MAP criterion. Sequences with intermediate sparsity suitable of ...

Array processing is an area of study devoted to processing the signals received from an antenna array and extracting information of interest. It has played an important role in widespread applications like radar, sonar, and wireless communications. Numerous adaptive array processing algorithms have been reported in the literature in the last several decades. These algorithms, in a general view, exhibit a trade-off between performance and required computational complexity. In this thesis, we focus on the development of array processing algorithms in the application of beamforming and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. In the beamformer design, we employ the constrained minimum variance (CMV) and the constrained constant modulus (CCM) criteria to propose full-rank and reduced-rank adaptive algorithms. Specifically, for the full-rank algorithms, we present two low-complexity adaptive step size mechanisms with the CCM criterion for the step size adaptation of the ...

This thesis discusses approaches and techniques to convert Sparsely-Sampled Light Fields (SSLFs) into Densely-Sampled Light Fields (DSLFs), which can be used for visualization on 3DTV and Virtual Reality (VR) devices. Exemplarily, a movable 1D large-scale light field acquisition system for capturing SSLFs in real-world environments is evaluated. This system consists of 24 sparsely placed RGB cameras and two Kinect V2 sensors. The real-world SSLF data captured with this setup can be leveraged to reconstruct real-world DSLFs. To this end, three challenging problems require to be solved for this system: (i) how to estimate the rigid transformation from the coordinate system of a Kinect V2 to the coordinate system of an RGB camera; (ii) how to register the two Kinect V2 sensors with a large displacement; (iii) how to reconstruct a DSLF from a SSLF with moderate and large disparity ranges. ...

The wireless communication industry has experienced rapid growth in recent years, and digital cellular systems are currently designed to provide high data rates at high terminal speeds. High data rates give rise to intersymbol interference (ISI) due to so-called multipath fading. Such an ISI channel is called frequency selective. On the other hand, due to terminal mobility and/or receiver frequency offset the received signal is subject to frequency shifts (Doppler shifts). Doppler shift induces time-selectivity characteristics. The Doppler effect in conjunction with ISI gives rise to a so-called doubly selective channel (frequency- and time-selective). In addition to the channel effects, the analog front-end may suffer from an imbalance between the I and Q branch amplitudes and phases as well as from carrier frequency offset. These analog front-end imperfections then result in an additional and significant degradation in system performance, especially ...

Inverse scattering is relevant to a very large class of problems, where the unknown structure of a scattering object is estimated by measuring the scattered field produced by known probing waves. Therefore, for more than three decades, the promises of non-invasive imaging inspection by electromagnetic probing radiations have been justifying a research interest on these techniques. Several application areas are involved, such as civil and industrial engineering, non-destructive testing and medical imaging as well as subsurface inspection for oil exploration or unexploded devices. In spite of this relevance, most scattering tomography techniques are not reliable enough to solve practical problems. Indeed, the nonlinear relationship between the scattered field and the object function and the robustness of the inversion algorithms are still open issues. In particular, microwave tomography presents a number of specific difficulties that make it much more involved to ...

As many machine learning and signal processing problems are fundamentally nonconvex and too expensive/difficult to be convexified, my research is focused on understanding the optimization landscapes of their fundamentally nonconvex formulations. After understanding their optimization landscapes, we can develop optimization algorithms to efficiently navigate these optimization landscapes and achieve the global optimality convergence. So, the main theme of this thesis would be optimization, with an emphasis on nonconvex optimization and algorithmic developments for these popular optimization problems. This thesis can be conceptually divided into four parts: Part 1: Convex Optimization. In the first part, we apply convex relaxations to several popular nonconvex problems in signal processing and machine learning (e.g. line spectral estimation problem and tensor decomposition problem) and prove that the solving the new convex relaxation problems is guaranteed to achieve the globally optimal solutions of their original nonconvex ...

Reverberation consists of a complex acoustic phenomenon that occurs inside rooms. Many audio signal processing methods, addressing source localization, signal enhancement and other tasks, often assume absence of reverberation. Consequently, reverberant environments are considered challenging as state-ofthe-art methods can perform poorly. The acoustics of a room can be described using a variety of mathematical models, among which, physical models are the most complete and accurate. The use of physical models in audio signal processing methods is often non-trivial since it can lead to ill-posed inverse problems. These inverse problems require proper regularization to achieve meaningful results and involve the solution of computationally intensive large-scale optimization problems. Recently, however, sparse regularization has been applied successfully to inverse problems arising in different scientific areas. The increased computational power of modern computers and the development of new efficient optimization algorithms makes it possible ...

To reduce scanning time or improve spatio-temporal resolution in some MRI applications, parallel MRI acquisition techniques with multiple coils have emerged since the early 90’s as powerful methods. In these techniques, MRI images have to be reconstructed from ac- quired undersampled “k-space” data. To this end, several reconstruction techniques have been proposed such as the widely-used SENSitivity Encoding (SENSE) method. However, the reconstructed images generally present artifacts due to the noise corrupting the ob- served data and coil sensitivity profile estimation errors. In this work, we present novel SENSE-based reconstruction methods which proceed with regularization in the complex wavelet domain so as to promote the sparsity of the solution. These methods achieve ac- curate image reconstruction under degraded experimental conditions, in which neither the SENSE method nor standard regularized methods (e.g. Tikhonov) give convincing results. The proposed approaches relies on ...

In this thesis, signal and image processing algorithms based on sparsity and interval convex programming are developed for inverse problems. Inverse signal processing problems are solved by minimizing the ℓ1 norm or the Total Variation (TV) based cost functions in the literature. A modified entropy functional approximating the absolute value function is defined. This functional is also used to approximate the ℓ1 norm, which is the most widely used cost function in sparse signal processing problems. The modified entropy functional is continuously differentiable, and convex. As a result, it is possible to develop iterative, globally convergent algorithms for compressive sensing, denoising and restoration problems using the modified entropy functional. Iterative interval convex programming algorithms are constructed using Bregman’s D-Projection operator. In sparse signal processing, it is assumed that the signal can be represented using a sparse set of coefficients in ...

Compressed sensing (CS) is a recently introduced signal acquisition framework that goes against the traditional Nyquist sampling paradigm. CS demonstrates that a sparse, or compressible, signal can be acquired using a low rate acquisition process. Since noise is always present in practical data acquisition systems, sensing and reconstruction methods are developed assuming a Gaussian (light-tailed) model for the corrupting noise. However, when the underlying signal and/or the measurements are corrupted by impulsive noise, commonly employed linear sampling operators, coupled with Gaussian-derived reconstruction algorithms, fail to recover a close approximation of the signal. This dissertation develops robust sampling and reconstruction methods for sparse signals in the presence of impulsive noise. To achieve this objective, we make use of robust statistics theory to develop appropriate methods addressing the problem of impulsive noise in CS systems. We develop a generalized Cauchy distribution (GCD) ...

In this thesis we investigate the use of first-order convex optimization methods applied to problems in signal and image processing. First we make a general introduction to convex optimization, first-order methods and their iteration complexity. Then we look at different techniques, which can be used with first-order methods such as smoothing, Lagrange multipliers and proximal gradient methods. We continue by presenting different applications of convex optimization and notable convex formulations with an emphasis on inverse problems and sparse signal processing. We also describe the multiple-description problem. We finally present the contributions of the thesis. The remaining parts of the thesis consist of five research papers. The first paper addresses non-smooth first-order convex optimization and the trade-off between accuracy and smoothness of the approximating smooth function. The second and third papers concern discrete linear inverse problems and reliable numerical reconstruction software. ...

In this thesis we investigate centralized and distributed variants of sparse Bayesian learning (SBL), an effective probabilistic regression method used in machine learning. Since inference in an SBL model is not tractable in closed form, approximations are needed. We focus on the variational Bayesian approximation, as opposed to others used in the literature, for three reasons: First, it is a flexible general framework for approximate Bayesian inference that estimates probability densities including point estimates as a special case. Second, it has guaranteed convergence properties. And third, it is a deterministic approximation concept that is even applicable for high dimensional problems where non-deterministic sampling methods may be prohibitive. We resolve some inconsistencies in the literature involved in other SBL approximation techniques with regard to a proper Bayesian treatment and the incorporation of a very desired property, namely scale invariance. More specifically, ...

Resistivity distribution estimation, widely known as Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), is a non linear ill-posed inverse problem. However, the partial derivative equation ruling this experiment yields no analytical solution for arbitrary conductivity distribution. Thus, solving the forward problem requires an approximation. The Finite Element Method (FEM) provides us with a computationally cheap forward model which preserves the non linear image-data relation and also reveals sufficiently accurate for the inversion. Within the Bayesian approach, Markovian priors on the log-conductivity distribution are introduced for regularization. The neighborhood system is directly derived from the FEM triangular mesh structure. We first propose a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation with a Huber-Markov prior which favours smooth distributions while preserving locally discontinuous features. The resulting criterion is minimized with the pseudo-conjugate gradient method. Simulation results reveal significant improvements in terms of robustness to noise, computation rapidity ...