In this paper, we propose a method for video reflection removal using a video restoration framework with enhanced deformable networks (EDVR). We examine the effect of each module in EDVR on video reflection removal and modify the models using 3D convolutions. The performance of each modified model is evaluated in terms of the RMSE between the structural similarity (SSIM) and the smoothed SSIM representing temporal consistency.

Accurate fish detection is of great significance in aquaculture. However, the non-uniform strong reflection in aquaculture ponds will affect the precision of fish detection. This paper combines YOLOv4 and CVAE to accurately detect fishes in the image with non-uniform strong reflection, in which the reflection in the image is removed at first and then the reflection-removed image is provided for fish detecting. Firstly, the improved YOLOv4 is applied to detect and mask the strong reflective region, to locate and label the reflective region for the subsequent reflection removal. Then, CVAE is combined with the improved YOLOv4 for inferring the priori distribution of the Reflection region and restoring the Reflection region by the distribution so that the reflection can be removed. For further improving the quality of the reflection-removed images, the adversarial learning is appended to CVAE. Finally, YOLOV4 is used to detect fishes in the high quality image. In addition, a new image dataset of pond cultured takifugu rubripes is constructed,, which includes 1000 images with fishes annotated manually, also a synthetic dataset including 2000 images with strong reflection is created and merged with the generated dataset for training and verifying the robustness of the proposed method. Comprehensive experiments are performed to compare the proposed method with the state-of-the-art fish detecting methods without reflection removal on the generated dataset. The results show that the fish detecting precision and recall of the proposed method are improved by 2.7% and 2.4% respectively.

In this letter, we propose a deep neural network and semi-supervised learning based dehazing algorithm. The dehazing network uses a pyramidal architecture to recover the haze-free scene from a single hazy image in a coarse-to-fine order. To faithfully restore the objects with different scales, we incorporate cascaded multi-scale convolutional blocks into each level of the pyramid. Feature fusion and transfer in the network are achieved using the paths constructed by interleaved residual connections. For better generalization to the complicated haze in real-world environments, we also devise a discriminator that enables semi-supervised adversarial training. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed work outperforms comparative ones with higher quantitative metrics and more visually pleasant outputs. It can also enhance the robustness of object detection under haze.

An optical-layer adaptive restoration scheme is validated by a real-time experiment and numerical analyses. In this paper, it is assumed that this scheme can adaptively optimize the bitrate (up to 600Gb/s) and an optical reach with 100Gb/s granularity to maintain high-capacity optical signal transmission. The practicality of 600-Gb/s/carrier optical signal transmission over 101.6-km field-installed fiber is confirmed prior to the adaptive restoration experiment. After modifying the field setup, a real-time experiment on network recovery is demonstrated with bitrate adaptation for 600-Gb/s to 400-Gb/s signals. The results indicate that this scheme can restore failed connections with recovery times comparable to those of conventional restoration scheme; thus 99.9999% system availability can be easily attained even under double-link failures. Numerical analysis clarifies that adaptive restoration can recover >80% of double-link failures on several realistic topologies and improvement amount against conventional scheme is semi-statistically characterized by restoration path length.

This paper presents an interference suppression and signal restoration technique that can create the clean signals required by automotive frequency-modulated continuous wave radar systems. When a radar signal from another radar system interferes with own transmitted radar signal, the target detection performance is degraded. This is because the beat frequency corresponding to the target cannot be estimated owing to the increase in the noise floor. In this case, advanced weighted-envelope normalization or wavelet denoising can be used to mitigate the effect of the interference; however, these methods can also lead to the loss of the desired signal containing the range and velocity information of the target. Therefore, we propose a method based on an autoregressive model to restore a signal damaged by mutual interference. The method uses signals that are not influenced by the interference to restore the signal. In experiments conducted using two different automotive radar systems, our proposed method is demonstrated to effectively suppress the interference and restore the desired signal. As a result, the noise floor resulting from the mutual interference was lowered and the beat frequency corresponding to the desired target was accurately estimated.

A novel image enhancement method for vein recognition is introduced. Inspired by observation that the intensity of the vein vessel changes rapidly during the smoothing process compared to that of background (i.e., skin tissue) due to its thin and long shape, we propose to exploit the smoothing speed as a restoration weight for the vein image enhancement. Experimental results based on the CASIA multispectral palm vein database demonstrate that the proposed method is effective to improve the performance of vein recognition.

Hazes with various properties spread widely across flat areas with depth continuities and corner areas with depth discontinuities. Removing haze from a single hazy image is difficult due to its ill-posed nature. To solve this problem, this study proposes a modified hybrid median filter that performs a median filter to preserve the edges of flat areas and a hybrid median filter to preserve depth discontinuity corners. Recovered scene radiance, which is obtained by removing hazy particles, restores image visibility using adaptive nonlinear curves for dynamic range expansion. Using comparative studies and quantitative evaluations, this study shows that the proposed method achieves similar or better results than those of other state-of-the-art methods.

In this letter, an effective low bit-rate image restoration method is proposed, in which image denoising and subspace regression learning are combined. The proposed framework has two parts: image main structure estimation by classical NLM denoising and texture component prediction by subspace joint regression learning. The local regression function are learned from denoised patch to original patch in each subspace, where the corresponding compression image patches are employed to generate anchoring points by the dictionary learning approach. Moreover, we extent Extreme Support Vector Regression (ESVR) as multi-variable nonlinear regression to get more robustness results. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method achieves favorable performance compared with other leading methods.

Existing image deblurring methods with a blurred/noisy image pair take a two-step approach: blur kernel estimation and image restoration. They can achieve better and much more stable blur kernel estimation than single image deblurring methods. On the other hand, in the image restoration step, they do not exploit the information on the noisy image, or they require ad hoc tuning of interdependent parameters. This paper focuses on the image restoration step and proposes a new restoration method of using a blurred/noisy image pair. In our method, the image restoration problem is formulated as a constrained convex optimization problem, where data-fidelity to a blurred image and that to a noisy image is properly taken into account as multiple hard constraints. This offers (i) high quality restoration when the blurred image also contains noise; (ii) robustness to the estimation error of the blur kernel; and (iii) easy parameter setting. We also provide an efficient algorithm for solving our optimization problem based on the so-called alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Experimental results support our claims.

This paper presents a novel speaking aid system to help laryngectomees produce more naturally sounding electrolaryngeal (EL) speech. An electrolarynx is an external device to generate excitation signals, instead of vibration of the vocal folds. Although the conventional EL speech is quite intelligible, its naturalness suffers from the unnatural fundamental frequency (F0) patterns of the mechanically generated excitation signals. To improve the naturalness of EL speech, we have proposed EL speech enhancement methods using statistical F0 pattern prediction. In these methods, the original EL speech recorded by a microphone is presented from a loudspeaker after performing the speech enhancement. These methods are effective for some situation, such as telecommunication, but it is not suitable for face-to-face conversation because not only the enhanced EL speech but also the original EL speech is presented to listeners. In this paper, to develop an EL speech enhancement also effective for face-to-face conversation, we propose a method for directly controlling F0 patterns of the excitation signals to be generated from the electrolarynx using the statistical F0 prediction. To get an "actual feel” of the proposed system, we also implement a prototype system. By using the prototype system, we find latency issues caused by a real-time processing. To address these latency issues, we furthermore propose segmental continuous F0 pattern modeling and forthcoming F0 pattern modeling. With evaluations through simulation, we demonstrate that our proposed system is capable of effectively addressing the issues of latency and those of electrolarynx in term of the naturalness.

This paper proposes a novel framework for enhancing underwater images captured by optical imaging model and non-local means denoising. The proposed approach adjusts the color balance using biasness correction and the average luminance. Scene visibility is then enhanced based on an underwater optical imaging model. The increase in noise in the enhanced images is alleviated by non-local means (NLM) denoising. The final enhanced images are characterized by improved visibility while retaining color fidelity and reducing noise. The proposed method does not require specialized hardware nor prior knowledge of the underwater environment.

Restoration is an important area in improving the visual quality, and lays the foundation for accurate object detection or terrain classification in image analysis. In this paper, we introduce Beta process priors into hierarchical sparse Bayesian learning for recovering underlying degraded hyperspectral images (HSI), including suppressing the various noises and inferring the missing data. The proposed method decomposes the HSI into the weighted summation of the dictionary elements, Gaussian noise term and sparse noise term. With these, the latent information and the noise characteristics of HSI can be well learned and represented. Solved by Gibbs sampler, the underlying dictionary and the noise can be efficiently predicted with no tuning of any parameters. The performance of the proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art ones and validated on two hyperspectral datasets, which are contaminated with the Gaussian noises, impulse noises, stripes and dead pixel lines, or with a large number of data missing uniformly at random. The visual and quantitative results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

In this research, we investigated the reliability of a 1-out-of-2 system with two-stage repair comprising hardware restoration and data reconstruction modes. Hardware restoration is normally independently executed by two modules. In contrast, we assumed that one of the modules could omit data reconstruction by replicating the data from the module during normal operation. In this 1-out-of-2 system, the two modules mutually cooperated in the recovery mode. As a first step, an evaluation model using Markov chains was constructed to derive a reliability measure: “unavailability in steady state.” Numerical examples confirmed that the reliability of the system was improved by the use of two cooperating modules. As the data reconstruction time increased, the gains in terms of system reliability also increased.

This paper addresses the issue of implementing a sequence for restoring fiber links and communication paths that have failed due to a catastrophe. We present a mathematical formulation to minimize the total number of steps needed to restore communication paths. We also propose two heuristic algorithms: Minimum spanning tree - based degree order restoration and Congestion link order restoration. Numerical evaluations show that integer linear programming based order restoration yields the fewest number of restoration steps, and that the proposed heuristic algorithms, when used properly with regard to the accommodation rate, are highly effective for real-world networks.

In this letter, a local characteristic image restoration based on convolutional neural network is proposed. In this method, image restoration is considered as a classification problem and images are divided into several sub-blocks. The convolutional neural network is used to extract and classify the local characteristics of image sub-blocks, and the different forms of the regularization constraints are adopted for the different local characteristics. Experiments show that the image restoration results by the regularization method based on local characteristics are superior to those by the traditional regularization methods and this method also has lower computing cost.

Recovery of low-rank matrices has seen significant activity in many areas of science and engineering, motivated by theoretical results for exact reconstruction guarantees and interesting practical applications. Recently, numerous methods incorporated the nuclear norm to pursue the convexity of the optimization. However, this greatly restricts its capability and flexibility in dealing with many practical problems, where the singular values have clear physical meanings. This paper studies a generalized non-convex low-rank approximation, where the singular values are in lp-heuristic. Then specific results are derived for image restoration, including denoising and deblurring. Extensive experimental results on natural images demonstrate the improvement of the proposed method over the recent image restoration methods.

Appropriate turn-taking is important in spoken dialogue systems as well as generating correct responses. Especially if the dialogue features quick responses, a user utterance is often incorrectly segmented due to short pauses within it by voice activity detection (VAD). Incorrectly segmented utterances cause problems both in the automatic speech recognition (ASR) results and turn-taking: i.e., an incorrect VAD result leads to ASR errors and causes the system to start responding though the user is still speaking. We develop a method that performs a posteriori restoration for incorrectly segmented utterances and implement it as a plug-in for the MMDAgent open-source software. A crucial part of the method is to classify whether the restoration is required or not. We cast it as a binary classification problem of detecting originally single utterances from pairs of utterance fragments. Various features are used representing timing, prosody, and ASR result information. Experiments show that the proposed method outperformed a baseline with manually-selected features by 4.8% and 3.9% in cross-domain evaluations with two domains. More detailed analysis revealed that the dominant and domain-independent features were utterance intervals and results from the Gaussian mixture model (GMM).

This letter deals with the signal declipping algorithm based on the matrix rank minimization approach, which can be applied to the signal restoration in linear systems. We focus on the null space of a low-rank matrix and provide a block adaptive algorithm of the matrix rank minimization approach to signal declipping based on the null space alternating optimization (NSAO) algorithm. Numerical examples show that the proposed algorithm is faster and has better performance than other algorithms.

This paper proposes a disaster recovery method for transport networks. In a scenario of recovery from a disaster, a network is repaired through multiple restoration stages because repair resources are limited. In a practical case, a network should provide the reachability of important traffic in transient stages, even as service interruption risks and/or operational overheads caused by transport paths switching are suppressed. Then, we define the multi-objective optimization problem: maximizing the traffic recovery ratio and minimizing the number of switched transport paths at each stage. We formulate our problem as linear programming, and show that it yields pareto-optimal solutions of traffic recovery versus the number of switched paths. We also propose a heuristic algorithm for applying to networks consisting of a few hundred nodes, and show that it can produce sub-optimal solutions that differ only slightly from optimal solutions.

An important issue of fragile watermarking for image is to locate and restore the tampered pixels individually and accurately. This issue is resolved for concentrated tampering. In contrast, for diverse tampering, only localization is realized. This paper presents a restoration method for the most accurate scheme tolerant against diverse tampering. We analyze the error probability and experimentally confirm that the proposed method accurately restores the tampered pixels. We also show two variations based on the fact that the authentication data used for deriving the watermark is a maximum length sequence code.