Conventional image retargeting methods fail to avoid distortion in the case where visually important regions are distributed all over the image. To reduce distortions, this paper proposes a novel image retargeting method that incorporates letterboxing into an image warping framework. Letterboxing has the advantage of producing results without distortion or content loss although being unable to use the entire display area. Therefore, it is preferable to combine a retargeting method with a letterboxing operator when displaying images in full screen. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to conventional methods in terms of visual quality measured by an objective metric.

This paper proposes a novel adaptive image interpolation method using an edge-directed smoothness filter. Adaptive image interpolation methods tend to create higher visual quality images than traditional interpolation methods such as bicubic interpolation. These methods, however, often suffer from high computational costs and production of inadequate interpolated pixels. We propose a novel method to overcome these problems. Our approach is to estimate the enlarged image from the original image based on an observation model. Obtaining an image with edge-directed smoothness, we constrain the estimated image to have many edge-directed smooth pixels which are measured by using the edge-directed smoothness filter introduced in this paper. Additionally, we also propose a simplification of our algorithm to run with lower computational complexity and smaller memory. Simulation results show that the proposal method produces images with high visual quality and performs well on PSNR and computational times.

This study improves the compression efficiency of Lee's colorization-based coding framework by introducing a novel colorization matrix construction and an adaptive color conversion. Colorization-based coding methods reconstruct color components in the decoder by colorization, which adds color to a base component (a grayscale image) using scant color information. The colorization process can be expressed as a linear combination of a few column vectors of a colorization matrix. Thus it is important for colorization-based coding to make a colorization matrix whose column vectors effectively approximate color components. To make a colorization matrix, Lee's colorization-based coding framework first obtains a base and color components by RGB-YCbCr color conversion, and then performs a segmentation method on the base component. Finally, the entries of a colorization matrix are created using the segmentation results. To improve compression efficiency on this framework, we construct a colorization matrix based on a correlation of base-color components. Furthermore, we embed an edge-preserving smoothing filtering process into the colorization matrix to reduce artifacts. To achieve more improvement, our method uses adaptive color conversion instead of RGB-YCbCr color conversion. Our proposed color conversion maximizes the sum of the local variance of a base component, which resulted in increment of the difference of intensities at region boundaries. Since segmentation methods partition images based on the difference, our adaptive color conversion leads to better segmentation results. Experiments showed that our method has higher compression efficiency compared with the conventional method.

In this paper, we propose an improved seam merging method for content-aware image resizing. This method merges a two-pixel-width seam element into one new pixel in image reduction and inserts a new pixel between the two pixels in image enlargement. To preserve important contents and structure, our method uses energy terms associated with importance and structure. Our method preserve the main structures by using a cartoon version of the original image when calculating the structure energy. In addition, we introduce a new energy term to suppress the distortion generated by excessive reduction or enlargement in iterated merger or insertion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can produce satisfactory results in both image reduction and enlargement.

In this paper, we propose a novel content-aware image resizing method based on grid transformation. Our method focuses on not only keeping important regions unchanged but also keeping the aspect ratio of the main object in an image unchanged. The dual conditions can avoid distortion which often occurs when only using the former condition. Our method first calculates image importance. Next, we extract the main objects on an image by using image importance. Finally, we calculate the optimal grid transformation which suppresses changes in size of important regions and in the aspect ratios of the main objects. Our method uses lower and upper thresholds for transformation to suppress distortion due to extreme shrinking and enlargement. To achieve better resizing results, we introduce a boundary discarding process. This process can assign wider regions to important regions, reducing distortions on important regions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method resizes images with less distortion than other resizing methods.

The relative arrangement, such as relative positions and orientations among objects, can play an important role in expressing the situation such as sports games and race scenes. In this paper, we propose a retargeting method that allows maintaining the relative arrangement. Our proposed retargeting method is based on a warping method which finds an optimal transformation by solving an energy minimization problem. To achieve protection of object arrangement, we introduce an energy that enforces all the objects and the relative positions among these objects to be transformed by the same transformation in the retargeting process. In addition, our method imposes the following three types of conditions in order to obtain more satisfactory results: protection of important regions, avoiding extreme deformation, and cropping with preservation of the balance of visual importance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method maintains the relative arrangement while protecting important regions.

Depth estimation for a lense-array type light field camera is a challenging problem because of the sensor noise and the radiometric distortion which is a global brightness change among sub-aperture images caused by a vignetting effect of the micro-lenses. We propose a depth map estimation method which has robustness against sensor noise and radiometric distortion. Our method first binarizes sub-aperture images by applying the census transform. Next, the binarized images are matched by computing the majority operations between corresponding bits and summing up the Hamming distance. An initial depth obtained by matching has ambiguity caused by extremely short baselines among sub-aperture images. After an initial depth estimation process, we refine the result with following refinement steps. Our refinement steps first approximate the initial depth as a set of depth planes. Next, we optimize the result of plane fitting with an edge-preserving smoothness term. Experiments show that our method outperforms the conventional methods.

In this paper, we propose an example-based single image super resolution (SR) method by l2 approximation with self-sampled image patches. Example-based super resolution methods can reconstruct high resolution image patches by a linear combination of atoms in an overcomplete dictionary. This reconstruction requires a pair of two dictionaries created by tremendous low and high resolution image pairs from the prepared image databases. In our method, we introduce the dictionary by random sampling patches from just an input image and eliminate its training process. This dictionary exploits the self-similarity of images and it will no more depend on external image sets, which consern the storage space or the accuracy of referred image sets. In addition, we modified the approximation of input image to an l2-norm minimization problem, instead of commonly used sparse approximation such as l1-norm regularization. The l2 approximation has an advantage of computational cost by only solving an inverse problem. Through some experiments, the proposed method drastically reduces the computational time for the SR, and it provides a comparable performance to the conventional example-based SR methods with an l1 approximation and dictionary training.

Intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), which irradiates doses to a target organ, calculates the irradiation dose using the radiation treatment planning system (RTPS). The irradiation quality is ensured by verifying that the dose distribution planned by RTPS is the same as the data measured by two-dimensional (2D) detectors. Since an actual three-dimensional (3D) distribution of irradiated dose spreads complicatedly, it is different from that of RTPS. Therefore, it is preferable to evaluate by using not only RTPS, but also actual irradiation dose distribution. In this paper, in order to perform a dose-volume histogram (DVH) evaluation of the irradiation dose distribution, we propose a method of correcting the dose distribution of RTPS by using sparsely measured radial data from 2D dose detectors. And we perform a DVH evaluation of irradiation dose distribution and we show that the proposed method contributes to high-precision DVH evaluation. The experimental results show that the estimates are in good agreement with the measured data from the 2D detectors and that the peak signal to noise ratio and the structural similarity indexes of the estimates are more accurate than those of RTPS. Therefore, we present the possibility of an evaluation of the actual irradiation dose distribution using measured data in a limited observation direction.