Fourier Transform and Image Compression - image-processing

I'm getting all pixels' RGB values into
R=[],
G=[],
B=[]
arrays from the picture. They are 8 bits [0-255] values containing arrays. And I need to use Fourier Transform to compress image with a lossy method.
Fourier Transform
N will be the pixel numbers. n is i for array. What will be the k and imaginary j?
Can I implement this equation into a programming language and get the compressed image file?
Or I need to use the transformation equation to a different value instead of RGB?

First off, yes, you should convert from RGB to a luminance space, such as YCbCr. The human eye has higher resolution in luminance (Y) than in the color channels, so you can decimate the colors much more than the luminance for the same level of loss. It is common to begin by reducing the resolution of the Cb and Cr channels by a factor of two in both directions, reducing the size of the color channels by a factor of four. (Look up Chroma Subsampling.)
Second, you should use a discrete cosine transform (DCT), which is effectively the real part of the discrete Fourier transform of the samples shifted over one-half step. What is done in JPEG is to break the image up into 8x8 blocks for each channel, and doing a DCT on every column and row of each block. Then the DC component is in the upper left corner, and the AC components increase in frequency as you go down and to the left. You can use whatever block size you like, though the overall computation time of the DCT will go up with the size, and the artifacts from the lossy step will have a broader reach.
Now you can make it lossy by quantizing the resulting coefficients, more so in the higher frequencies. The result will generally have lots of small and zero coefficients, which is then highly compressible with run-length and Huffman coding.

Related

Workflow to clean badly scanned sheet music

I am looking for a workflow that would clean (and possibly straighten) old and badly scanned images of musical scores (like the one below).
I've tried to use denoise, hough filters, imagemagick geometry filters, and I am struggling to identify the series of filters that remove the scanner noise/bias.
Just some quick ideas:
Remove grayscale noise: Do a low pass filter (darks), since the music is darker than a lot of the noise. Remaining noise is mostly vertical lines.
Rotate image: Sum grayscale values for each column of the image. You'll get a vector with the total pixel lightness in that column. Use gradient descent or search on the rotation of the image (within some bounds like +/-15deg rotation) to maximize the variance of that vector. Idea here is that the vertical noise lines indicate vertical alignment, and so we want the columns of the image to align with these noise lines (= maximized variance).
Remove vertical line noise: After rotation, take median value of each column. The greater the distance (squared difference) a pixel is from that median darkness, the more confident we are it is its true color (e.g. a pure white or black pixel when vertical noise was gray). Since noise is non-white, you could try blending this distance by the whiteness of the median for an alternative confidence metric. Ideally, I think here you'd train some 7x7x2 convolution filter (2 channels being pixel value and distance from median) to estimate true value of the pixel. That would be the most minimal machine learning approach, not using some full-fledged NN. However, given your lack of training data, we'll have to come up with our own heuristic for what the true pixel value is. You likely will need to play around with it, but here's what I think might work:
Set some threshold of confidence; above that threshold we take the value as is. Below the threshold, set to white (the binary expected pixel value for the entire page).
For all values below threshold, take the max confidence value within a +/-2 pixels L1 distance (e.g. 5x5 convolution) as that pixel's value. Seems like features are separated by at least 2 pixels, but for lower resolutions that window size may need to be adjusted. Since white pixels may end up being more confident overall, you could experiment with prioritizing darker pixels (increase their confidence somehow).
Clamp the image contrast and maybe run another low pass filter.

How bilinear interpolation works when down scaling?

I can clearly understand how bilinear interpolation works when up scaling the image, like fill the values while taking 4 nearest neighbours, but i can't understand how it works while down scaling the image. It would mean a lot to me if someone clarify for me.
Scaling an image requires mapping pixels from the input to pixels on the output. If those pixel coordinates don't map to an integer, interpolation is required to estimate what the pixel value would have been. The "Bi" part of bilinear means it's linear interpolation applied in two dimensions independently. If for example output pixel 2,3 needs to come from input coordinates 1.5,7.2 you would interpolate in the X direction by taking 0.5 of each of the pixels at 1.0 and 2.0, then interpolate in the Y direction by taking 0.8 of the pixel at 7.0 and 0.2 of the pixel at 8.0. Usually these operations are combined into a single set of equations, but they can be applied separately if needed.
Bilinear is a poor choice for downscaling because it leads to aliasing artifacts. This is when you attempt to create spatial frequencies that are beyond the Nyquist sampling limit, and high frequency detail turns into low frequency artifacts. You can minimize this by blurring the image before you downscale it. Or you can choose an interpolation algorithm that incorporates some low pass filtering.

Difference between contrast stretching and histogram equalization

I would like to know the difference between contrast stretching and histogram equalization.
I have tried both using OpenCV and observed the results, but I still have not understood the main differences between the two techniques. Insights would be of much needed help.
Lets Define Contrast first,
Contrast is a measure of the “range” of an image; i.e. how spread its intensities are. It has many formal definitions one famous is Michelson’s:
He says contrast = ( Imax - Imin )/( Imax + I min )
Contrast is strongly tied to an image’s overall visual quality.
Ideally, we’d like images to use the entire range of values available
to them.
Contrast Stretching and Histogram Equalisation have the same goal: making the images to use entire range of values available to them.
But they use different techniques.
Contrast Stretching works like mapping
it maps minimum intensity in the image to the minimum value in the range( 84 ==> 0 in the example above )
With the same way, it maps maximum intensity in the image to the maximum value in the range( 153 ==> 255 in the example above )
This is why Contrast Stretching is un-reliable, if there exist only two pixels have 0 and 255 intensity, it is totally useless.
However a better approach is Histogram Equalisation which uses probability distribution. You can learn the steps here
I came across the following points after some reading.
Contrast stretching is all about increasing the difference between the maximum intensity value in an image and the minimum one. All the rest of the intensity values are spread out between this range.
Histogram equalization is about modifying the intensity values of all the pixels in the image such that the histogram is "flattened" (in reality, the histogram can't be exactly flattened, there would be some peaks and some valleys, but that's a practical problem).
In contrast stretching, there exists a one-to-one relationship of the intensity values between the source image and the target image i.e., the original image can be restored from the contrast-stretched image.
However, once histogram equalization is performed, there is no way of getting back the original image.
In Histogram equalization, you want to flatten the histogram into a uniform distribution.
In contrast stretching, you manipulate the entire range of intensity values. Like what you do in Normalization.
Contrast stretching is a linear normalization that stretches an arbitrary interval of the intensities of an image and fits the interval to an another arbitrary interval (usually the target interval is the possible minimum and maximum of the image, like 0 and 255).
Histogram equalization is a nonlinear normalization that stretches the area of histogram with high abundance intensities and compresses the area with low abundance intensities.
I think that contrast stretching broadens the histogram of the image intensity levels, so the intensity around the range of input may be mapped to the full intensity range.
Histogram equalization, on the other hand, maps all of the pixels to the full range according to the cumulative distribution function or probability.
Contrast is the difference between maximum and minimum pixel intensity.
Both methods are used to enhance contrast, more precisely, adjusting image intensities to enhance contrast.
During histogram equalization the overall shape of the histogram
changes, whereas in contrast stretching the overall shape of
histogram remains same.

JPEG algorithm - Replacing DCT with Hadamard Transform

I would like to replace the Discrete Cosine Transform in JPEG format with Hadamard Transform. But I don't know what stage have to be added/dropped/changed in the original algorithm.
As I understand it the JPEG algorithm without the Huffman coding is as follows:
Image division into 8x8 non-overlapping blocks;
Each block is level-shift by subtracting 128 from it;
DCT on each block to frequency domain. Here I want to use Hadamard instead;
Quantization by quality factor;
Reordering of each block in zig-zag pattern;
Removing the trailing zeroes and inserting EOB symbol (End-Of-Block);
My guess is that the zig-zag reordering will not move all the frequencies with the highest energy concentration to the head of the vector, and all the zeroes will be trailing, hence have to be changed.
Also the level-shift, which is used to reduce the range of the DCT coefficents (gives greater precision) may have to be changed.
The answer may be in JPEG-XR format, which uses the HT instead of the DCT, but It will take a while before I can take a copy of it and understand all the mathematics behind it.
You should look at the standard called JPEG-XR.
It uses Hadamard Transform instead of DCT.
There's also an open source implementation of it.
Good Luck.

How to apply box filter on integral image? (SURF)

Assuming that I have a grayscale (8-bit) image and assume that I have an integral image created from that same image.
Image resolution is 720x576. According to SURF algorithm, each octave is composed of 4 box filters, which are defined by the number of pixels on their side. The
first octave uses filters with 9x9, 15x15, 21x21 and 27x27 pixels. The
second octave uses filters with 15x15, 27x27, 39x39 and 51x51 pixels.The third octave uses filters with 27x27, 51x51, 75x75 and 99x99 pixels. If the image is sufficiently large and I guess 720x576 is big enough (right??!!), a fourth octave is added, 51x51, 99x99, 147x147 and 195x195. These
octaves partially overlap one another to improve the quality of the interpolated results.
// so, we have:
//
// 9x9 15x15 21x21 27x27
// 15x15 27x27 39x39 51x51
// 27x27 51x51 75x75 99x99
// 51x51 99x99 147x147 195x195
The questions are:What are the values in each of these filters? Should I hardcode these values, or should I calculate them? How exactly (numerically) to apply filters to the integral image?
Also, for calculating the Hessian determinant I found two approximations:
det(HessianApprox) = DxxDyy − (0.9Dxy)^2 anddet(HessianApprox) = DxxDyy − (0.81Dxy)^2Which one is correct?
(Dxx, Dyy, and Dxy are Gaussian second order derivatives).
I had to go back to the original paper to find the precise answers to your questions.
Some background first
SURF leverages a common Image Analysis approach for regions-of-interest detection that is called blob detection.
The typical approach for blob detection is a difference of Gaussians.
There are several reasons for this, the first one being to mimic what happens in the visual cortex of the human brains.
The drawback to difference of Gaussians (DoG) is the computation time that is too expensive to be applied to large image areas.
In order to bypass this issue, SURF takes a simple approach. A DoG is simply the computation of two Gaussian averages (or equivalently, apply a Gaussian blur) followed by taking their difference.
A quick-and-dirty approximation (not so dirty for small regions) is to approximate the Gaussian blur by a box blur.
A box blur is the average value of all the images values in a given rectangle. It can be computed efficiently via integral images.
Using integral images
Inside an integral image, each pixel value is the sum of all the pixels that were above it and on its left in the original image.
The top-left pixel value in the integral image is thus 0, and the bottom-rightmost pixel of the integral image has thus the sum of all the original pixels for value.
Then, you just need to remark that the box blur is equal to the sum of all the pixels inside a given rectangle (not originating in the top-lefmost pixel of the image) and apply the following simple geometric reasoning.
If you have a rectangle with corners ABCD (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right), then the value of the box filter is given by:
boxFilter(ABCD) = A + D - B - C,
where A, B, C, D is a shortcut for IntegralImagePixelAt(A) (B, C, D respectively).
Integral images in SURF
SURF is not using box blurs of sizes 9x9, etc. directly.
What it uses instead is several orders of Gaussian derivatives, or Haar-like features.
Let's take an example. Suppose you are to compute the 9x9 filters output. This corresponds to a given sigma, hence a fixed scale/octave.
The sigma being fixed, you center your 9x9 window on the pixel of interest. Then, you compute the output of the 2nd order Gaussian derivative in each direction (horizontal, vertical, diagonal). The Fig. 1 in the paper gives you an illustration of the vertical and diagonal filters.
The Hessian determinant
There is a factor to take into account the scale differences. Let's believe the paper that the determinant is equal to:
Det = DxxDyy - (0.9 * Dxy)^2.
Finally, the determinant is given by: Det = DxxDyy - 0.81*Dxy^2.
Look at page 17 of this document
http://www.sci.utah.edu/~fletcher/CS7960/slides/Scott.pdf
If you made a code for normal Gaussian 2D convolution, just use the box filter as a Gaussian kernel and the input image will be the same original image not integral image. The results from this method will be same with the one you asked.

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