We propose a method for local spectral component decomposition based on the line feature of local distribution. Our aim is to reduce noise on multi-channel images by exploiting the linear correlation in the spectral domain of a local region. We first calculate a linear feature over the spectral components of an M -channel image, which we call the spectral line, and then, using the line, we decompose the image into three components: a single M -channel image and two gray-scale images. By virtue of the decomposition, the noise is concentrated on the two images, and thus our algorithm needs to denoise only the two gray-scale images, regardless of the number of the channels. As a result, image deterioration due to the imbalance of the spectral component correlation can be avoided. The experiment shows that our method improves image quality with less deterioration while preserving vivid contrast. Our method is especially effective for hyperspectral images. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can compete with the other state-of-the-art denoising methods.

Sparse unmixing is widely used for hyperspectral imagery to estimate the optimal fraction (abundance) of materials contained in mixed pixels (endmembers) of a hyperspectral scene, by considering the abundance sparsity. This abundance has a unique property, i.e., high spatial correlation in local regions. This is due to the fact that the endmembers existing in the region are highly correlated. This implies the low-rankness of the abundance in terms of the endmember. From this prior knowledge, it is expected that considering the low-rank local abundance to the sparse unmixing problem improves estimation performance. In this study, we propose an algorithm that exploits the low-rank local abundance by applying the nuclear norm to the abundance matrix for local regions of spatial and abundance domains. In our optimization problem, the local abundance regularizer is collaborated with the L 2,1 norm and the total variation for sparsity and spatial information, respectively. We conducted experiments for real and simulated hyperspectral data sets assuming with and without the presence of pure pixels. The experiments showed that our algorithm yields competitive results and performs better than the conventional algorithms.

SUMMARYUsing a flash/no-flash image pair, we propose a novel white-balancing technique that can effectively correct the color balance of a complex scene under multiple light sources. In the proposed method, by using multiple images of the same scene taken under different lighting conditions, we estimate the reflectance component of the scene and the multiple shading components of each image. The reflectance component is a specific object color which does not depend on scene illumination and the shading component is a shading effect caused by the illumination lights. Then, we achieve white balancing by appropriately correcting the estimated shading components. The proposed method achieves better performance than conventional methods, especially under colored illumination and mixed lighting conditions.