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This paper presents a two-level hierarchical multi-resolution image fusion method based on attention, which focus on combining multi-sensor images from visible and infrared spectrums into an image while maintaining the salient information necessary for human visual. Attention-based one-level fusion employs adaptive weighting fusion rules to obtain the initial fused image which may being the boundary of saliency regions, then two-level fusion based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) is used to hide possible imprints of the initial fused image. Firstly, for the given visible and infrared images from the same scene, salient regions are detected by visual attention model. Secondly, salient sizes are acquired by calculating maximum entropy. Thirdly, one-level fusion is achieved by the adoptive weighing fusion rules. Various weight values are adopted according to the visual saliency order from high to low. The initial fused image contains not only the salient information of visible image, but also the salient thermal target information of infrared image. Finally, two-level fusion based on NSCT is employed to fuse the visible source image, the infrared source image and the initial fused image, and the final fused image is obtained. Two different data sets from TNO, Human Factors are employed and the experimental results show that the proposed approach is efficient and also performed better than some existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The double-random phase-encoding (DRPE) technique is a typical optical image encryption technique, which can also be used for image hiding. Usually, the secret image is encrypted with the DRPE technique and the encoded image is hidden into the host image via superimposition to obtain the stego-image. The attack technique on the DRPE-based image hiding method was proposed in this paper. Firstly, a randomly selected superimposition coefficient was used to approximate the original superimposition coefficient to extract the hidden encoded images from the stego-images approximately. Then, the chosen-plaintext attack technique on the DRPE-based optical image encryption technique was applied to recover the random phase masks used in the DRPE technique. The theoretical analysis indicated that, without considering the computational error, the recovered secret image via the proposed attack technique is identical to the original one. Even considering the computational error, it is identical to the secret image recovered with the original DRPE-based image hiding method, which demonstrates that the attack on the DRPE-based image hiding method is successfully achieved. The numerical simulation results demonstrated the correctness of the theoretical analysis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel method to detect license plates in video sequences automatically. The framework mainly integrates the cascade detectors method and the Tracking Learning Detection (TLD) algorithm. The cascade detectors are used to detect license plates, and the TLD algorithm is adopted to track the license plate regions. The license plates in the first frame image are detected by the cascade detectors to build the original tracking list, the tracking results and the detection results in following frames will be compared, and the newly appearing license plate information will be added to the tracking list. Meanwhile, the tracking results existing in the current tracking list would be replaced by the corresponding detection results with higher degree of confidence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for license plate detection task on a road intersection dataset, and the experimental evaluation shows the detection performance has been greatly improved by synthetically using the detection and tracking strategy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Artificial vision systems are powerful tools for the automatic guiding of fruit harvesting robots, a novel method based on chromatic aberration map and luminance map is developed to identify citrus fruits with highlight within a tree canopy. Twenty images of citrus-grove scene under direct sunlight are taken, the color properties of target objects are analyzed. First, parts of citrus fruits from background are segmented from background by thresholding the CAM (chromatic aberration map), then the highlight region of citrus fruits could be detected correctly from the tree canopy by thresholding the LM (luminance map), at last the citrus fruits can be detected integrally by fusing the segmented results of CAM and LM. The results showed that the fruits under direct sunlight can be segmented wholly using this algorithm, the detection accuracy by fusion method is up to 86.81%, and the false alarm rate of fusion method is 2.25%. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: An adaptive enhancement algorithm is proposed in the paper for low illumination color image which is low brightness and low contrast. The algorithm is realized through three steps: the global brightness adaptive adjustment, locally adaptive contrast enhancement and color restore. Experiments show that the brightness and local contrast of low illumination color image can be effectively enhanced. The details, especially in the dark region of enhanced image are more prominent and the enhanced image is more vivid than some other methods for low illumination color image enhancement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the object recognition process of the remote sensing image, as the object data is influenced by the imaging scale, intensity and the shape of the object, the distribution of the object data is very different with that of known training data which leads to the low reliability of the object recognition. Aimed at the problem, an object recognition method based on transfer learning framework for the remote sensing image is proposed in this paper. The feature vectors of the object data are extracted by an improved LBP firstly, and then the transfer learning is used to find the common parameters among the feature spaces of the object data with the different distributions. The transfer learning method can transfer knowledge from the old object data to the new object data and improve the performance of the object recognition. According to the experiments in the satellite remote sensing images, it shows that the accuracy of object recognition has been greatly improved by our proposed method compared with the other classical methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a license plate detection method based on the gradient information and a cascade detection framework. The proposed method consists of three main modules: image preprocessing, license plate detection and license plate confirmation. Considering the diversities of Chinese license plate, we first get the gradient images to unify plate forms through image preprocessing. The license plate will be detected roughly by using the cascade AdaBoost classifier in the next step. Finally, several heuristic judgment strategies and a voting-based method are used to verify the candidate license plates. The effectiveness of our method is validated with an experimental study in license plate detection. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recently the sparse representation based classification (SRC) is successfully used to automatically recognize facial expression, well-known for its ability to solve occlusion and corruption problems. The results of those methods which using different features conjunction with SRC framework show state of the art performance on clean or noised facial expression images. Therefore, the role of feature extraction for SRC framework will greatly affect the success of facial expression recognition (FER). In this paper, we select a new feature which called LBP map. This feature is generated using local binary pattern (LBP) operator. It is not only robust to gray-scale variation, but also extracts sufficient texture information for SRC to deal with FER problem. Then we proposed a new method using the LBP map conjunction with the SRC framework. Firstly, we compared our method with state of the art published work. Then experiments on the Cohn–Kanade database show that the LBP map+SRC can reach the highest accuracy with the lowest time-consuming on clean face images than those methods which use different features such as raw image, Downsample image, Eigenfaces, Laplacianfaces and Gabor conjunction with SRC. We also experiment the LBP map+SRC to recognize face image with partial occluded and corrupted, the result shows that this method is more robust to occlusion and corruption than existing methods based on SRC framework. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We propose a new method to estimate image bias field by an intuitive assumption that the overall trend of image surface is associated with bias field and the true bias field can evolve from image surface. To constrain the evolution, an energy function is designed based on two diffusion constraints. One is that the bias-free image has concise representation with image gradients. The other constraint is that model fit on the bias field which is more relaxed than previous methods. The new algorithm enables adaptive specifications of the estimated bias field's smoothness. The experimental results show our new technique can be applied to intensity inhomogeneity correction of medical image effectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an Instance Transfer Boosting (ITB) framework for object tracking. The proposed tracking framework tries to transfer prior knowledge from the first frame and frame t-2 regarded as source instance to frame t-1 approximately as target instance. Those instances build the online training classifier used in tracking-by-detection for frame t. The novel method presents the tracking task in the current frame from the knowledge transferred by the first frame and the previous two frames, resulting in a more robust tracker for distinguishing the object from the background. Experimental results on several public video sequences demonstrated promising performance of the proposed tracking framework in both tracking accuracy and stability. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the problem of automatic face recognition with limited manually labeled training data. We propose a new semi-supervised self-training approach which is used to automatically augment the manually labeled training set with new unlabeled data. Semi-supervised Discriminant Analysis is used in each iteration of self-training for discriminative dimensionality reduction by making use of both labeled and unlabeled training data. Sparse representation is applied for classification. Experimental results on four independent databases show that our algorithm outperforms other face recognition methods under 3 different configurations, namely transductive, semi-supervised and single training image. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: When digital watermarking is used for piracy tracking, different watermarks are needed to be embedded into different distributions of a digital product. Based on double random phase encoding (DRPE) technique, cascaded-phases iterative algorithm and random-phase-shift algorithm, Chen et al. proposed a method to generate many different embedded watermarks from one reference watermark, while the embedded watermark can be recognized by testing the correlation between the recovered watermark and the original reference watermark. In this way, only the reference watermark instead of the embedded watermarks needs to be stored and managed. However, since the recovered watermark may be different from the embedded watermark, especially under any image processing, the correlation between the recovered watermark and the reference watermark may be different from the correlation between the embedded watermark and the reference watermark, which may result in wrong recognition. In this paper, the performance of Chen's method was analyzed with numerical simulations. The results indicated that, to correctly recognize the embedded watermark, the number of generated embedded watermarks with Chen's method is limited. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Factor analysis is a powerful tool used for the analysis of dynamic studies. One of the major drawbacks of Factor Analysis of Dynamic Structures (FADS) is that the solution is not mathematically unique when only non-negativity constraints are used to determine factors and factor coefficients. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to correct FADS solutions by constructing and minimizing a new objective function. The method is improved from non-negative matrix factorizations (NMFs) algorithm by adding a sparse constraint that penalizes multiple components in the images of the factor coefficients. The technique is tested on computer simulations, and a patient ultrasound liver study. The results show that the method works well in comparison to the truth in computer simulations and to region of interest (ROI) measurements in the experimental studies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: As an optical image encryption technique, the double random phase encoding (DRPE) technique can be used to encrypt the watermark image. However, since the DRPE system may be attacked with cryptanlysis, the security of the DRPE technique is somewhat weak. To improve the security, an image watermark generation algorithm based on cascaded iterative Fourier transform algorithm (CIFT) was proposed. In the proposed algorithm, two phase masks were obtained by applying the CIFT algorithm on the original reference watermark image and the final embedded watermark image was obtained with them. One of the phase masks was kept as the secret key. When detecting the watermark, the embedded watermark was extracted from the watermarked host image. Then, the recovered watermarked was obtained with the extracted watermark and the secret key. By comparing the recovered watermark and the original reference watermark, whether the tested image containing the watermark or not can be judged. With the CIFT algorithm, it is more secure to generate the embedded watermark. In addition, it is practical because only one of the phase masks is needed for watermark recovery. The simulation results show that the proposed method has good imperceptibility and robustness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]