The ability of humans to perceive significant pattern and structure of an image is something which humans take for granted. We can recognize objects and patterns independent of changes in image contrast and illumination. In the past decades, it has been widely recognized in both biology and computer vision that phase contains critical information in characterizing the structures in images. Despite the importance of local phase information and its significant success in many computer vision and image processing applications, the coherence behavior of local phases at scale-space is not well understood. This thesis concentrates on developing an invariant image representation method based on local phase information. In particular, considerable effort is devoted to study the coherence relationship between local phases at different scales in the vicinity of image features and to develop robust methods to measure the strength of this relationship. A computational framework that computes local phase coherence (LPC) intensity with arbitrary selections in the number of coefficients, scales, as well as the scale ratios between them has been developed. Particularly, we formulate local phase prediction as an optimization problem, where the objective function computes the closeness between true local phase and the predicted phase by LPC. The proposed framework not only facilitates flexible and reliable computation of LPC, but also broadens the potentials of LPC in many applications. We demonstrate the potentials of LPC in a number of image processing applications. Firstly, we have developed a novel sharpness assessment algorithm, identified as LPC-Sharpness Index (LPC-SI), without referencing the original image. LPC-SI is tested using four subject-rated publicly-available image databases, which demonstrates competitive performance when compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. Secondly, a new fusion quality assessment algorithm has been developed to objectively assess the performance of existing fusion algorithms. Validations over our subject-rated multi-exposure multi-focus image database show good correlations between subjective ranking score and the proposed image fusion quality index. Thirdly, the invariant properties of LPC measure have been employed to solve image registration problem where inconsistency in intensity or contrast patterns are the major challenges. LPC map has been utilized to estimate image plane transformation by maximizing weighted mutual information objective function over a range of possible transformations. Finally, the disruption of phase coherence due to blurring process is employed in a multi-focus image fusion algorithm. The algorithm utilizes two activity measures, LPC as sharpness activity measure along with local energy as contrast activity measure. We show that combining these two activity measures result in notable performance improvement in achieving both maximal contrast and maximal sharpness simultaneously at each spatial location.

Estruturas do tipo linha/curva (line-like, curve-like), alongadas e ramificadas são comumente encontradas nos ecossistemas que conhecemos. Na biomedicina e na biociências, por exemplo, diversas aplicações podem ser observadas. Justamente por este motivo, extrair este tipo de estrutura em imagens é um constante desafio em problemas de análise de imagens. Porém, diversas dificuldades estão envolvidas neste processo. Normalmente as características espectrais e espaciais destas estruturas podem ser muito complexas e variáveis. Especificamente as mais \"finas\" são muito frágeis a qualquer tipo de processamento realizado na imagem e torna-se muito fácil a perda de informações importantes. Outro problema bastante comum é a ausência de parte das estruturas, seja por motivo de pouca resolução, ou por problemas de aquisição, ou por casos de oclusão. Este trabalho tem por objetivo explorar, descrever e desenvolver técnicas de detecção/segmentação de estruturas finas e ramificadas. Diferentes métodos são utilizados de forma combinada, buscando uma melhor representação topológica e perceptual das estruturas e, assim, melhores resultados. Grafos são usados para a representação das estruturas. Esta estrutura de dados vem sendo utilizada com sucesso na literatura na resolução de diversos problemas em processamento e análise de imagens. Devido à fragilidade do tipo de estrutura explorado, além das técnicas de processamento de imagens, princípios de visão computacional são usados. Busca-se, desta forma, obter um melhor \"entendimento perceptual\" destas estruturas na imagem. Esta informação perceptual e informações contextuais das estruturas são utilizadas em um modelo de campos aleatórios de Markov, buscando o resultado final da detecção através de um processo de otimização. Finalmente, também propomos o uso combinado de diferentes modalidades de imagens simultaneamente. Um software é resultado da implementação do arcabouço desenvolvido e o mesmo é utilizado em duas aplicações para avaliar a abordagem proposta: extração de estradas em imagens de satélite e extração de raízes em imagens de perfis de solo. Resultados do uso da abordagem proposta na extração de estradas em imagens de satélite mostram um melhor desempenho em comparação com método existente na literatura. Além disso, a técnica de fusão proposta apresenta melhora significativa de acordo com os resultados apresentados. Resultados inéditos e promissores são apresentados na extração de raízes de plantas. / Line- curve-like, elongated and ramified structures are commonly found inside many known ecosystems. In biomedicine and biosciences, for instance, different applications can be observed. Therefore, the process to extract this kind of structure is a constant challenge in image analysus problems. However, various difficulties are involved in this process. Their spectral and spatial characteristics are usually very complex and variable. Considering specifically the thinner ones, they are very \"fragile\" to any kind of process applied to the image, and then, it becomes easy the loss of crucial data. Another very common problem is the absence of part of the structures, either because of low image resolution and image acquisition problems or because of occlusion problems. This work aims to explore, describe and develop techniques for detection/segmentation of thin and ramified structures. Different methods are used in a combined way, aiming to reach a better topological and perceptual representation of the structures and, therefore, better results. Graphs are used to represent the structures. This data structure has been successfully used in the literature for the development of solutions for many image processing and analysis problems. Because of the fragility of the kind of structures we are dealing with, some computer vision principles are used besides usual image processing techniques. In doing so, we search for a better \"perceptual understanding\" of these structures in the image. This perceptual information along with contextual information about the structures are used in a Markov random field, searching for a final detection through an optimization process. Lastly, we propose the combined use of different image modalities simultaneously. A software is produced from the implementation of the developed framework and it is used in two application in order to evaluate the proposed approach: extraction of road networks from satellite images and extraction of plant roots from soil profile images. Results using the proposed approach for the extraction of road networks show a better performance if compared with an existent method from the literature. Besides that, the proposed fusion technique presents a meaningful improvement according to the presented results. Original and promising results are presented for the extraction of plant roots from soil profile images.

This master’s thesis gives a description of fundus camera as a medical imaging system. Sub features of this system are explained in short, thus examples of certain construction variants are given. Furthermore, the work deals with image fusion and associated possibilities of digital image processing. One set of consecutive scanned images of human eye’s retina has been provided for the practical part of this work. During program processing of these data, decomposition of obtained images to single-color sequences is performed. For these partial monochromatic sequences, monomodal registration is performed, based on calculation of the brightness similarity criterion between the pairs of images. From the three created monochromatic sequences of registered images, new sequence of color images is created, using multimodal registration of each image triples. As a basis for similarity evaluation during multimodal registration, an information similarity criterion was used.

The European Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60/EC) is a mandatory agreement that guides the member states of the European Union in the field of water policy to fulfil the requirements for reaching the aim of the good ecological status of water bodies. In the last years several work ows and methods were developed to determine and evaluate the haracteristics and the status of the water bodies. Due to their area measurements remote sensing methods are a promising approach to constitute a substantial additional value. With increasing availability of optical and radar remote sensing data the development of new methods to extract information from both types of remote sensing data is still in progress. Since most limitations of these data sets do not agree the fusion of both data sets to gain data with higher spectral resolution features the potential to obtain additional information in contrast to the separate processing of the data. Based thereupon this study shall research the potential of multispectral and radar remote sensing data and the potential of their fusion for the assessment of the parameters of water body structure. Due to the medium spatial resolution of the freely available multispectral Sentinel-2 data sets especially the surroundings of the water bodies and their land use are part of this study. SAR data is provided by the Sentinel-1 satellite. Different image fusion methods are tested and the combined products of both data sets are evaluated afterwards. The evaluation of the single data sets and the fused data sets is performed by means of a maximum-likelihood classification and several statistical measurements. The results indicate that the combined use of different remote sensing data sets can have an added value.

The range of missions performed by Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) has been steadily growing in the past decades thanks to continued development in several disciplines. The goal of increasing the autonomy of UAS's is widening the range of tasks which can be carried out without, or with minimal, external help. This thesis presents methods for increasing specific aspects of autonomy of UAS's operating both in outdoor and indoor environments where cameras are used as the primary sensors. First, a method for fusing color and thermal images for object detection, geolocation and tracking for UAS's operating primarily outdoors is presented. Specifically, a method for building saliency maps where human body locations are marked as points of interest is described. Such maps can be used in emergency situations to increase the situational awareness of first responders or a robotic system itself. Additionally, the same method is applied to the problem of vehicle tracking. A generated stream of geographical locations of tracked vehicles increases situational awareness by allowing for qualitative reasoning about, for example, vehicles overtaking, entering or leaving crossings. Second, two approaches to the UAS indoor localization problem in the absence of GPS-based positioning are presented. Both use cameras as the main sensors and enable autonomous indoor ight and navigation. The first approach takes advantage of cooperation with a ground robot to provide a UAS with its localization information. The second approach uses marker-based visual pose estimation where all computations are done onboard a small-scale aircraft which additionally increases its autonomy by not relying on external computational power.

Infrared images could highlight the semantic areas like pedestrians and be robust to luminance changes, while visible images provide abundant background details and good visual effects. Multi-modal image fusion for surveillance application aims to generate an informative fused images from two source images real-time, so as to facilitate surveillance observatory or object detection tasks. In this work, we firstly investigate conventional methods like multi-scale transform-based methods and subspace-based methods, and deep learning-based methods like AE, CNN and GAN in details. After fully discussion of their advantages and disadvantages, CNN-based methods are chosen due to their robustness and end-to-end feature. A novel real-time CNN-based model is proposed with optimized model architecture and loss functions. The model is based on Dense net structure to reuse the previous features, but the number of layers and the depth are extremely optimized, so as to improve the fusion efficiency. The size of the feature maps keeps the same to avoid information losses. The loss function includes pixel intensity loss, gradient loss and decompose loss. The intensity and gradient loss use the maximum strategy to keep the highlighted semantic areas, and the decompose loss is to compare the reconstructed images and source images, so as to push the fusion model maintain more features. The model is trained on MSRS dataset, and evaluate on the LLVIP, MSRS and TNO datasets with other 9 state-of-the-art algorithms qualitatively and quantitatively. The good visual effect of our proposed model and the outstanding comparison results on 10 evaluation metrics comprehensively and objectively proves its good fusion ability. / Infraröda bilder kan markera semantiska områden så som fotgängare och vara robusta för ljusförändringar, medan synliga bilder ger rikliga bakgrundsdetaljer och goda visuella effekter. Multimodal bildfusion för övervakningsapplikation syftar till att generera en informativ samansatt bild från två källbilder i realtid, för att underlätta övervakningsobservatorium eller objektdetekteringsuppgifter. I detta arbete undersöker vi först konventionella metoder som flerskaliga transformbaserade metoder och subspace-baserade metoder, och djupinlärningsbaserade metoder som AE, CNN och GAN i detalj. Efter fullständig diskussion om deras fördelar och nackdelar väljs CNN-baserade metoder på grund av deras robusthet och end-to-end-funktion. En ny CNN-baserad modell i realtid föreslås med optimerad modellarkitektur och förlustfunktioner. Modellen är baserad på tät nätstruktur för att återanvända de tidigare funktionerna, men antalet lager och djupet är extremt optimerade för att förbättra fusionseffektiviteten. Storleken på funktionskartorna förblir densamma för att undvika informationsförluster. Förlustfunktionen inkluderar pixelintensitetsförlust, gradientförlust och sönderdelningsförlust. Intensitets- och gradientförlusten använder den maximala strategin för att behålla de markerade semantiska områdena, och nedbrytningsförlusten är att jämföra de rekonstruerade bilderna och källbilderna för att driva fusionsmodellen med fler funktioner. Modellen tränas på MSRS-datauppsättning och utvärderas på LLVIP-, MSRS- och TNO-dataset med andra 9 toppmoderna algoritmer kvalitativt och kvantitativt. Den goda visuella effekten av vår föreslagna modell och de enastående jämförelseresultaten på 10 utvärderingsmått bevisar omfattande och objektivt dess goda fusionsförmåga.

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Fúze obrazu je dnes jednou z nejběžnějších avšak stále velmi diskutovanou oblastí v lékařském zobrazování a hraje důležitou roli ve všech oblastech lékařské péče jako je diagnóza, léčba a chirurgie. V této dizertační práci jsou představeny tři projekty, které jsou velmi úzce spojeny s oblastí fúze medicínských dat. První projekt pojednává o 3D CT subtrakční angiografii dolních končetin. V práci je využito kombinace kontrastních a nekontrastních dat pro získání kompletního cévního stromu. Druhý projekt se zabývá fúzí DTI a T1 váhovaných MRI dat mozku. Cílem tohoto projektu je zkombinovat stukturální a funkční informace, které umožňují zlepšit znalosti konektivity v mozkové tkáni. Třetí projekt se zabývá metastázemi v CT časových datech páteře. Tento projekt je zaměřen na studium vývoje metastáz uvnitř obratlů ve fúzované časové řadě snímků. Tato dizertační práce představuje novou metodologii pro klasifikaci těchto metastáz. Všechny projekty zmíněné v této dizertační práci byly řešeny v rámci pracovní skupiny zabývající se analýzou lékařských dat, kterou vedl pan Prof. Jiří Jan. Tato dizertační práce obsahuje registrační část prvního a klasifikační část třetího projektu. Druhý projekt je představen kompletně. Další část prvního a třetího projektu, obsahující specifické předzpracování dat, jsou obsaženy v disertační práci mého kolegy Ing. Romana Petera.