Greg Ongie

Generalized Higher Degree Total Variation (HDTV) Regularization

We introduce a family of novel image regularization penalties called generalized higher degree total variation (HDTV). These penalties further extend our previously introduced HDTV penalties, which generalize the popular total variation (TV) penalty to incorporate higher degree image derivatives. We show that many of the proposed second degree extensions of TV are special cases or are closely approximated by a generalized HDTV penalty. Additionally, we propose a novel fast alternating minimization algorithm for solving image recovery problems with HDTV and generalized HDTV regularization. The new algorithm enjoys a tenfold speed up compared with the iteratively reweighted majorize minimize algorithm proposed in a previous paper. Numerical experiments on 3D magnetic resonance images and 3D microscopy images show that HDTV and generalized HDTV improve the image quality significantly compared with TV.

Recovery of piecewise smooth images from few fourier samples

We introduce a Prony-like method to recover a continuous domain 2-D piecewise smooth image from few of its Fourier samples. Assuming the discontinuity set of the image is localized to the zero level-set of a trigonometric polynomial, we show the Fourier transform coefficients of partial derivatives of the signal satisfy an annihilation relation. We present necessary and sufficient conditions for unique recovery of piecewise constant images using the above annihilation relation. We pose the recovery of the Fourier coefficients of the signal from the measurements as a convex matrix completion algorithm, which relies on the lifting of the Fourier data to a structured low-rank matrix; this approach jointly estimates the signal and the annihilating filter. Finally, we demonstrate our algorithm on the recovery of MRI phantoms from few low-resolution Fourier samples.

Super-resolution MRI using finite rate of innovation curves

We propose a two-stage algorithm for the super-resolution of MR images from their low-frequency k-space samples. In the first stage we estimate a resolution-independent mask whose zeros represent the edges of the image. This builds off recent work extending the theory of sampling signals of finite rate of innovation (FRI) to two-dimensional curves. We enable its application to MRI by proposing extensions of the signal models allowed by FRI theory, and by developing a more robust and efficient means to determine the edge mask. In the second stage of the scheme, we recover the super-resolved MR image using the discretized edge mask as an image prior. We evaluate our scheme on simulated single-coil MR data obtained from analytical phantoms, and compare against total variation reconstructions. Our experiments show improved performance in both noiseless and noisy settings.

A fast algorithm for structured low-rank matrix recovery with applications to undersampled MRI reconstruction

Structured low-rank matrix priors are emerging as powerful alternatives to traditional image recovery methods such as total variation (TV) and wavelet regularization. The main challenge in applying these schemes to large-scale problems is the dramatic increase in computational complexity and memory demand that results from a lifting of the image to a high-dimensional structured matrix. We introduce a fast and memory efficient algorithm that exploits the structure of the lifted matrix to work in the original non-lifted domain, thus considerably reducing the complexity. Our experiments on the recovery of MR images from undersampled measurements show that the resulting algorithm provides improved reconstructions over TV regularization with comparable computation time.

Structured low-rank recovery of piecewise constant signals with performance guarantees

We derive theoretical guarantees for the exact recovery of piecewise constant two-dimensional images from a minimal number of non-uniform Fourier samples using a convex matrix completion algorithm. We assume the discontinuities of the image are localized to the zero level-set of a bandlimited function, which induces certain linear dependencies in Fourier domain, such that a multifold Toeplitz matrix built from the Fourier data is known to be low-rank. The recovery algorithm arranges the known Fourier samples into the structured matrix then attempts recovery of the missing Fourier data by minimizing the nuclear norm subject to structure and data constraints. This work adapts results by Chen and Chi on the recovery of isolated Diracs via nuclear norm minimization of a similar multifold Hankel structure. We show that exact recovery is possible with high probability when the bandlimited function describing the edge set satisfies an incoherency property. Finally, we demonstrate the algorithm on the recovery of undersampled MRI data.

Recovery of Discontinuous Signals Using Group Sparse Higher Degree Total Variation

We introduce a family of novel regularization penalties to enable the recovery of discrete discontinuous piecewise polynomial signals from undersampled or degraded linear measurements. The penalties promote the group sparsity of the signal analyzed under a nth order derivative. We introduce an efficient alternating minimization algorithm to solve linear inverse problems regularized with the proposed penalties. Our experiments show that promoting group sparsity of derivatives enhances the compressed sensing recovery of discontinuous piecewise linear signals compared with an unstructured sparse prior. We also propose an extension to 2-D, which can be viewed as a group sparse version of higher degree total variation, and illustrate its effectiveness in denoising experiments.

Accelerated dynamic MRI using structured low rank matrix completion

We introduce a fast structured low-rank matrix completion algorithm with low memory & computational demand to recover the dynamic MRI data from undersampled measurements. The 3-D dataset is modeled as a piecewise smooth signal, whose discontinuities are localized to the zero sets of a bandlimited function. We show that a structured matrix corresponding to convolution with the Fourier coefficients of the signal derivatives is highly low-rank. This property enables us to recover the signal from undersampled measurements. The application of this scheme in dynamic MRI shows significant improvement over state of the art methods.

Higher degree total variation for 3-D image recovery

We extend the novel higher degree total variation (HDTV) image regularization penalties to 3-D signals. These penalties generalize the popular total variation (TV) penalty to incorporate higher degree image derivatives. We adapt a fast alternating minimization algorithm designed for solving 2-D image recovery problems with HDTV regularization to the 3D setting. Numerical experiments on the compressed sensing recovery of 3-D magnetic resonance images show that HDTV and generalized HDTV improve the image quality significantly compared with TV. We also investigate the relationship between the recently introduced Hessian Schatten-norms and HDTV.