Abstract A unified mathematical model and an algorithm are proposed to solve the problems of the estimation of illumination and reflectance images of a natural image and the segmentation and bias field estimation of a magnetic resonance image(MRI). The proposed model only requires a basic assumption that the observed image can be approximated by the product of two intrinsic images with different properties. One of the two intrinsic images is a smooth image, S-image, and the other is a piece-wise approximately constant image, L-image. To fully exploit the properties of the intrinsic images, a scalable local analysis and integration(SLAI) approach is proposed for the problem of intrinsic image estimation. Due to the smoothness of the S-image, a low order Taylor expansion or a linear combination of general smooth basis functions is utilized to locally approximate the S-image. The obtained local smooth approximation of the S-image can be extended to a smooth image on the entire region of interest(ROI) using partition of unity subordinate to a cover of ROI. Meanwhile, the segmentation result and the estimation of the L-image are obtained. The proposed method is based on a weaker assumption than the methods in the literature, and therefore it is applicable to more images. The proposed method produces satisfactory results on MR images and natural images.
Fund:National Natural Science of Foundation of China(No.G0561671135)
Corresponding Authors:
LI Chunming, Ph.D., professor. His research interests include computer vision and medical image analysis.
About author:: SHI Xue, Ph.D. candidate. Her research interests include image processing and medical image analysis. XU Haiping, Ph.D., lecturer. Her research interests include image processing and machine learning.
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