Emrah Bostan

Wavelet Shrinkage With Consistent Cycle Spinning Generalizes Total Variation Denoising

We introduce a new wavelet-based method for the implementation of Total-Variation-type denoising. The data term is least-squares, while the regularization term is gradient-based. The particularity of our method is to exploit a link between the discrete gradient and wavelet shrinkage with cycle spinning, which we express by using redundant wavelets. The redundancy of the representation gives us the freedom to enforce additional constraints (e.g., normalization) on the solution to the denoising problem. We perform optimization in an augmented-Lagrangian framework, which decouples the difficult n-dimensional constrained-optimization problem into a sequence of n easier scalar unconstrained problems that we solve efficiently via traditional wavelet shrinkage. Our method can handle arbitrary gradient-based regularizers. In particular, it can be made to adhere to the popular principle of least total variation. It can also be used as a maximum a posteriori estimator for a variety of priors. We illustrate the performance of our method for image denoising and for the statistical estimation of sparse stochastic processes.

Sparse Stochastic Processes and Discretization of Linear Inverse Problems

We present a novel statistically-based discretization paradigm and derive a class of maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimators for solving ill-conditioned linear inverse problems. We are guided by the theory of sparse stochastic processes, which specifies continuous-domain signals as solutions of linear stochastic differential equations. Accordingly, we show that the class of admissible priors for the discretized version of the signal is confined to the family of infinitely divisible distributions. Our estimators not only cover the well-studied methods of Tikhonov and l1-type regularizations as particular cases, but also open the door to a broader class of sparsity-promoting regularization schemes that are typically nonconvex. We provide an algorithm that handles the corresponding nonconvex problems and illustrate the use of our formalism by applying it to deconvolution, magnetic resonance imaging, and X-ray tomographic reconstruction problems. Finally, we compare the performance of estimators associated with models of increasing sparsity.

A practical inverse-problem approach to digital holographic reconstruction

In this paper, we propose a new technique for high-quality reconstruction from single digital holographic acquisitions. The unknown complex object field is found as the solution of a nonlinear inverse problem that consists in the minimization of an energy functional. The latter includes total-variation (TV) regularization terms that constrain the spatial amplitude and phase distributions of the reconstructed data. The algorithm that we derive tolerates downsampling, which allows to acquire substantially fewer measurements for reconstruction compared to the state of the art. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through several experiments on simulated and real off-axis holograms.

Bayesian Denoising: From MAP to MMSE Using Consistent Cycle Spinning

We introduce a new approach for the implementation of minimum mean-square error (MMSE) denoising for signals with decoupled derivatives. Our method casts the problem as a penalized least-squares regression in the redundant wavelet domain. It exploits the link between the discrete gradient and Haar-wavelet shrinkage with cycle spinning. The redundancy of the representation implies that some wavelet-domain estimates are inconsistent with the underlying signal model. However, by imposing additional constraints, our method finds wavelet-domain solutions that are mutually consistent. We confirm the MMSE performance of our method through statistical estimation of Lévy processes that have sparse derivatives.

Bayesian Estimation for Continuous-Time Sparse Stochastic Processes

We consider continuous-time sparse stochastic processes from which we have only a finite number of noisy/noiseless samples. Our goal is to estimate the noiseless samples (denoising) and the signal in-between (interpolation problem). By relying on tools from the theory of splines, we derive the joint a priori distribution of the samples and show how this probability density function can be factorized. The factorization enables us to tractably implement the maximum a posteriori and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criteria as two statistical approaches for estimating the unknowns. We compare the derived statistical methods with well-known techniques for the recovery of sparse signals, such as the ℓ1 norm and Log (ℓ1-ℓ0 relaxation) regularization methods. The simulation results show that, under certain conditions, the performance of the regularization techniques can be very close to that of the MMSE estimator.

Reconstruction of biomedical images and sparse stochastic modeling

We propose a novel statistical formulation of the image-reconstruction problem from noisy linear measurements. We derive an extended family of MAP estimators based on the theory of continuous-domain sparse stochastic processes. We highlight the crucial roles of the whitening operator and of the Lévy exponent of the innovations which controls the sparsity of the model. While our family of estimators includes the traditional methods of Tikhonov and total-variation (TV) regularization as particular cases, it opens the door to a much broader class of potential functions (associated with infinitely divisible priors) that are inherently sparse and typically nonconvex. We also provide an algorithmic scheme - naturally suggested by our framework - that can handle arbitrary potential functions. Further, we consider the reconstruction of simulated MRI data and illustrate that the designed estimators can bring significant improvement in reconstruction performance.

Phase retrieval by using transport-of-intensity equation and differential interference contrast microscopy

We present a variational reconstruction algorithm for the phase-retrieval problem by using the differential interference contrast microscopy. Principally, we rely on the transport-of-intensity equation that specifies the sought phase as the solution of a partial differential equation. Our approach is based on an iterative reconstruction algorithm involving the total variation regularisation which is efficiently solved via the alternating direction method of multipliers. We illustrate the applicability of the method via real data experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this work demonstrates the performance of such an iterative algorithm on real data for the first time.

Spatio-temporal regularization of flow-fields

We introduce a novel variational framework for the regularized reconstruction of time-resolved volumetric flow fields. Our objective functional takes the physical characteristics of the underlying flow into account in both the spatial and the temporal domains. For an efficient minimization of the objective functional, we apply a proximal-splitting algorithm and perform parallel computations. To demonstrate the utility of our variational method, we first denoise a simulated flow-field in the human aorta and show that our method outperforms spatial-only regularization in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We then apply the scheme to a real 3D+time phase-contrast MRI dataset and obtain high-quality visualizations.

Autocalibrated signal reconstruction from linear measurements using adaptive GAMP

In this paper, we reconstruct signals from underdetermined linear measurements where the componentwise gains of the measurement system are unknown a priori. The reconstruction is performed through an adaptation of the messagepassing algorithm called adaptive GAMP that enables joint gain calibration and signal estimation. To evaluate our approach, we apply it to the problem of sparse recovery and compare it against an ℓ1-based approach. We numerically show that adaptive GAMP yields excellent results even for a moderate amount of data. It approaches the performance of oracle GAMP where the gains are perfectly known asymptotically.

Variational Phase Imaging Using the Transport-of-Intensity Equation

We introduce a variational phase retrieval algorithm for the imaging of transparent objects. Our formalism is based on the transport-of-intensity equation (TIE), which relates the phase of an optical field to the variation of its intensity along the direction of propagation. TIE practically requires one to record a set of defocus images to measure the variation of intensity. We first investigate the effect of the defocus distance on the retrieved phase map. Based on our analysis, we propose a weighted phase reconstruction algorithm yielding a phase map that minimizes a convex functional. The method is nonlinear and combines different ranges of spatial frequencies - depending on the defocus value of the measurements - in a regularized fashion. The minimization task is solved iteratively via the alternating-direction method of multipliers. Our simulations outperform commonly used linear and nonlinear TIE solvers. We also illustrate and validate our method on real microscopy data of HeLa cells.