## Monday, 23 June 2014

### The Creative and Digital Art of Image Blending

There is always more to art than what meets the eye. Throughout ages there have been mysteries and puzzles lurking behind those lines and patterns on canvas and artists go to great lengths to master and execute those techniques which have ushered in a new era of photorealism. Digital arts have taken it to a whole new level by enabling artists to do more with just a click of button. But that 'click' of the button encapsulates a series of mathematical operations that are oblivious to even the most profound artists of our time. Therein lies our opportunity for revelation :p. So just let your brain neurons fire away happily 'cause
Creativity is intelligence having fun
-Albert Einstein

You might be wondering as to what the poster of Ghost Rider is doing on a blog titled 'A Human In a Machine's Word', The Rider being neither a human nor a machine. Well it is here because it is an excellent example of a digital art form known as Image Blending in which two layers of different images - that of Johnny Blaze and the Ghost Rider in this instance, are seamlessly and aesthetically blended together. Such images are often created using commercial software like Adobe Photoshop. Today we shall try and understand what goes at the backend while creating such effects and then create our own masterpiece using Computer Vision techniques.

But first we need to understand the concept of Gaussian and Laplacian Image Pyramids

### Gaussian Pyramid

An image pyramid is a multi-scale representation of an image that allows the processing of an image at different resolutions. It is basically a collection of images derived from the original image using some mathematical operations. However, all pyramid representations have two properties in common:
1. The subsequent images are smaller than the current image, usually by a factor of 2. Thus, when the images are stacked together in the order of decreasing size, the stack resembles a pyramid and hence the name 'Image Pyramid'
2. The base of the pyramid captures the high frequency characteristics of the image, i.e, finer details (such as edges and texture) whereas the subsequent layers capture the low frequency characteristic or the coarser features in the image (such as object silhouettes and appearance)

In the case of gaussian pyramid, represented as $I_G(n)$ to denote the $n^{th}$ level of the gaussian pyramid of image $I(x,y)$, each subsequent layer is a gaussian smoothed and sampled version of the previous image. This deserves a deeper look.

Whenever a signal is sampled in the time domain, its Fourier transform replicates. For example, if $X(\Omega)$ is the Fourier Transform of a 1D signal $x[n]$, then the Fourier Transform of a sampled but zero-padded version of the signal $x_p[n]$ formed by selecting every $N^{th}$ value from the original signal while suppressing the remaining values to 0 is given by $X_p(\Omega)$ as shown below. The actually subsampled signal $x_d[n]$ is formed by compressing the zero-padded signal. Clearly if a signal is compressed by a factor of $\frac{1}{N}$, then its Fourier Transform is expanded by a factor of $N$
Notice that the fourier transform of the original signal and its final sampled version is similar except for magnitude and frequency scaling factors. This is an ideal situation and the sampled image looks like the original image just smaller in size. However, if $\Omega_M$ is large, so that the replicas begin to overlap then the fourier transform of the final sampled version gets distorted and is no longer similar to that of the original signal. This phenomenon is known as Aliasing. To avoid this situation, i.e, to prevent overlap between the replicas, it is essential for the following condition to hold

\begin{align}
\Omega_M < \frac{2\pi}{N}-\Omega_M
\implies \Omega_M < \frac{\pi}{N}
\end{align}

This is the great Nyquist Theorem, sampling rate $\frac{1}{N}$ must be at least twice the cut-off frequency to avoid aliasing (replace $\Omega_M$ by $2 \pi f_{cutoff}$ ). Unfortunately, real world signals more often than not fall prey to Aliasing. To deal with this situation the frequencies that would otherwise overlap with the replicas are chopped off prior to sampling by using a low-pass filter. Of course, there would be some high frequency losses, i.e some loss of details, but still we are much better off than the aliased versions. It turns out that filtering by a gaussian kernel in spatial domain is equivalent to passing the image through a low pass filter, provided the standard deviation of the kernel is chosen to be large enough. The reason is that Fourier Transform of a Gaussian is also a Gaussian

\begin{align}
\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}\sigma}e^{-\frac{x^2}{2\sigma^2}} \leftrightarrow e^{-2\pi^2 \sigma^2 u^2}
\end{align}

The latter is a Gaussian with a standard deviation of $\sigma_0=\frac{1}{2\pi \sigma}$. Now for a Gaussian 99% of its area is accounted for by the interval $[-3\sigma_0, 3\sigma_0]$. Hence its cut-off frequency can be safely assumed to be $3\sigma_0$. Using the Nyquist Theorem with $N=2$ gives us

$\sigma > \frac{6}{\pi}$

So, we can safely set $\sigma=2$ for our gaussian filter kernel and get a Gaussian Pyramid as follows

The process has been demonstrated in grayscale, however if the process is repeated for each of the color channels individual, RGB images can be processed like wise.

### Laplacian Pyramid

Once we have the Gaussian Pyramid, deriving the Laplacian Pyramid from it is a piece of cake. The process is as follows:

1. The coarsest scale is the same as that in the Gaussian Pyramid
2. Each subsequently finer level $I_L(i)$ is obtained by upsampling the next coarser level in the Gaussian Pyramid, $I_G(i+1)$ to the size of the current level ($i^{th}$ level) and subtracting it from $I_G(i)$. The upsampling requires interpolation but MATLAB has a 'imresize' function that does the operation for us, so we're cool for the moment.
The Laplace Pyramid for the above image looks like this

Often the name 'Laplacian' is thought to be a misnomer since nowhere we are taking double derivatives. However, the difference of gaussians is actually an approximation to the laplacian operator upto a scale factor as can be seen below. The argument is simplified using the fact that being Linear Time Invariant operators the order of Derivative and Gaussian Filter can be interchanged. Thus filtering an image with gaussian and then taking derivative is equivalent to filtering the image with the derivative of the gaussian filter.

\begin{align}
\text{Let } g(x,y;\sigma) &=\frac{1}{2\pi \sigma^2}e^{-\frac{x^2+y^2}{2\sigma^2}} \\
\nabla^2 g(x,y;\sigma) &= \frac{\partial^2 g}{\partial x^2}+ \frac{\partial^2 g}{\partial y^2}\\
&= \left(\frac{x^2+y^2}{\sigma^2}-1\right)\frac{1}{\sigma^2}g(x,y;\sigma)\\
\frac{\partial g}{\partial \sigma} &= \left(\frac{x^2+y^2}{\sigma^2}-1\right)\frac{1}{\sigma}g(x,y;\sigma)\\
\implies \nabla^2 g(x,y;\sigma) &=\frac{1}{\sigma}\frac{\partial g}{\partial \sigma}\\
&\approx \frac{1}{\sigma}\frac{g(x,y;\sigma+\Delta \sigma)-g(x,y;\sigma)}{\Delta \sigma}
\end{align}

The Laplacian Pyramid representation is useful because it is possible to reconstruct the image from it using the following algorithm:

for (i=levels-1;i>=1;i++) {
temp=upsample $I_L(i+1)$ to the size of $I_L(i)$;
$I_L(i)$=$I_L(i)$+temp;
}
return $I_L(i)$;

Finally, we are ready to understand Image Blending.

### Image Blending

The first task is to manually align the two images to be blended. We need to ensure that the two images are of the same size and somewhat compatible otherwise the blend is going to look like a forced mixture rather than a work of art. I have chosen the following two images

Next, we need to create a mask or a matrix which is the same size as these two images and is filled with 0's wherever we want to see more of The Rider and 1's wherever we want to see Johnny Blaze. My mask looks like this

Now, for the interesting part!! If we simply club the two images together the color contrast and misalignment of edges and details would work against the aesthetic appeal of the image. To tackle this problem the 'blending' must take place across different scales to achieve a smooth transition between the two halves. Also as we move inwards towards the junction from either left or right direction, the pixel values should borrow more and more properties from the other side to create the 'blend'.

Our approach is to first construct the Laplacian Pyramid of the blended image from the Laplacian Pyramids of the two component images and the Gaussian Pyramid of the mask. The blended image is then reconstructed from the blended pyramid. We have already been through the latter step. So, let us see how to obtain the blended pyramid.

This is done as follows. Each of the layers of the blended pyramid $I_{Lb}(i;x,y)$ is a obtained as a linear combination of the the two component pyramids $I_{Lc1}(i;x,y)$ and $I_{Lc2}(i;x,y)$ where the coefficients are functions of the values in the corresponding level in the Gaussian Pyramid of the mask $I_{Gm}(i;x,y)$

\begin{align}
I_{Lb}(i;x,y)=(1-I_{Gm}(i;x,y)) \times I_{Lc1}(i;x,y) + (I_{Gm}(i;x,y)) \times I_{Lc2}(i;x,y)
\end{align}

That seals our deal with the devil. Behold the beauty of our creation. Notice how the color of the Blaze's face and hair has developed an orangish glow to match that of The Rider's fire. More is the smoothing in the mask greater is the blending. However, the smoothing can not be overdone as it would lead to too much spill over across the junction.

 Two two halves clubbed together. Note the stark contrast at the junction

 Two halves blended together. The gaussian pyramid of the mask was constructed using kernel with standard deviation 2

 Two halves blended together. The gaussian pyramid of the mask was constructed using kernel with standard deviation 10
You know what!! There is a reason why The Ghost Rider has a rating of 5.2 on IMDB. It was the poor quality of Graphics used in the film. You just need to compare the original poster of the movie with the masterpiece that we have created to see this through x)

## Sunday, 2 February 2014

### Its only a matter of "Perspective"

We all have our own different way of looking at situations in life. Not only are there inter class variations, i.e differences between separate individuals, but there are significant intra class variations also, i.e the opinion of an individual is a function of time. The question is why?

Though I don't expect you to ask me for my opinion, I will give it anyway. Well my best guess is that these variations are manifestations of changes and differences in our position in the larger social structure that we are a part of and the unique path that each of has chosen that lands us all in different positions in the frame of reference of the situation. This mapping from our individualism to our take on any problem is highly nonlinear which renders us incapable of seeing others' viewpoint, unless of course, we are really good regressors. By the way you are a geek if you got that joke :p

The situation is quite similar when we are dealing with images. Today we are going to look at how to see an image from different perspectives. Consider a situation where your friend took a photograph standing at a point facing north-north-east. But you really want to see what the image looks like when you are facing north. Theoretically any two planes in 3-D space are related by a transformation known as a Homography and you can always do such a transformation. But before we dig our teeth into Homography we need to understand Perspective projection which is the most widely used model for representing image formation in a camera. Take a look at the schematic below:

 Perspective projection in camera

The above image tells you two things- first that I probably copied it from some Spanish website and secondly it tell us how we can model image capture of a 3-D point onto the image plane. Consider $F_c$ as the origin of the world's 3-D coordinate system. The plane $z=f$  is the image plane on which the 3-D scene is projected. For example a point P with world coordinates $(X,Y,Z)$ is projected to a point $(u,v,f)$ in the image plane. The relation between $P$ and its projection on the image plane is staring us in the face

$\frac{X}{Z}=\frac{u}{f}\;\;\;\; \frac{Y}{Z}=\frac{v}{f}$

Clearly the vectors $(X,Y,Z)$ and $(u,v,f)$ are equal up to a scale factor. Which brings us to the notion of homogeneous coordinates. This encapsulates the idea that as long as we know the ray passing through a point we can always choose our image plane by fixing $f$, the focal length. Coordinate $P$ is represented in homogeneous coordinates by

$\tilde{P}=(\frac{X}{Z},\frac{Y}{Z},1)$

Also note that the homogeneous representation of P and that of its projection are equal. You must have guessed by now that there is some relation between the pixel indices and the homogeneous coordinates. While this relation depends on the application, we shall look at one possible interpretation. In images, pixels are usually indexed from the top-left corner. So first we need to normalize the indices so that they lie between $[-1, 1]$ along the larger dimension. This is done by a simple operation

$S=max(Height, Width) \\ u=\frac{2i-Width}{S} \; \; \; \; v=\frac{2j-Height}{S} \\ \tilde{p}=(u,v,1)$

If at all it is required to change the image plane (which is equivalent to changing the scale), as in the case of Automatic Panorama Stitching, then we multiply the homogeneous coordinates by  a projection matrix

$\tilde{p}_0=\begin{bmatrix} f & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & f & 0\\0 & 0 & 1 \end{bmatrix} \times \left[ \begin{array}{c} u \\ v \\1 \end{array} \right] = K\tilde{p}$

For our purpose $K$ is simply a $3\times 3$ Identity matrix.

Now coming back to our objective, i.e looking at a photograph taken by your friend in the North-North-East direction from the "perspective" of a person facing North, let us assume that the image taken by your friend is this

 Image taken by your friend facing NNE

In order to understand the problem let us look at our coordinate system in a little detail

I hope this schematic does freak you out, because I spent a hell lot of my time making it :p. But its not all that complicated to understand. So first we need to understand that we are dealing with 3 coordinate systems here:
1) Global frame of reference, denoted by $[x,y,z]$, in which we know the positions of the two cameras
2) Frame of reference of your friends camera, denoted by $[x_1,y_1,z_1]$, in which we know the positions of each of the pixels on the image plane. A point in the "Global" frame of reference could be mapped to this coordinate system using a linear mapping

$\left[\begin{array}{c} x_1 \\ y_2 \\z_3 \end{array} \right] =R_1 \times \left[\begin{array}{c} x \\ y \\z \end{array} \right]$

where $R_1$ is a $3\times 3$ rotation matrix. You can use any of the representations of rotation matrix but in my code I've used the axis-angle representation in which one needs to specify the axis of rotation $\hat{n}$ and the angle of rotation $\theta$. Since any rotation matrix is orthogonal, the inverse mapping is as simple as

$\left[\begin{array}{c} x \\ y \\z \end{array} \right] =R_1^T \times \left[\begin{array}{c} x_1 \\ y_2 \\z_3 \end{array} \right]$

In our case the rotation matrix $R_1$ is parameterized by
$\theta=\frac{3 \pi}{2} \; \; \; \; \hat{n}=[0,1,0]$
3) Frame of reference in which we want to visualize the scene captured by our friend. This is marked by $[x_2,y_2,z_2]$. Rotation matrix $R_2$ for this coordinate system is similarly parameterized by
$\theta=\frac{11 \pi}{8} \; \; \; \; \hat{n}=[0,1,0]$

So now that we have gotten that out of the way, the question that we must answer is what is the transformation from our friends image plane to ours? The answer is now pretty simple and is known as a Homography
\begin{align}
\tilde{p_N}&=\alpha K_N R_N R_{NNE}^TK_{NNE}^{-1}\tilde{p}_{NNE} \\
&= \alpha H\tilde{p}_{NNE}
\end{align}

Note that the factor $\alpha$ is there simply to account for the fact that two homogenous coordinates are equal as long as they differ only by a scale factor.

That was as far as the theory goes. Now, there are two ways of practically doing this transformation - forward warping and inverse warping with one of them emerging as a clear winner.

Forward Warping
In this procedure each pixel is first normalized as discussed earlier and then transformed using the Homography matrix. But when we convert the homogeneous coordinates back to the pixel coordinates, there is no guarantee that we get integral values. On the contrary, most of the points would lie some between the integer valued pixels.
 Source: Marco Zuliani's lectures on Image Warping at UCSB
One way to deal with this problem is to round off the coordinates to integer values. This as you can imagine would result in multiple intensity values from the original image being mapped to the same pixel in the new image while leaving some holes in the new image where no intensity value got mapped. Look at the following example to see what I mean
 Forward warped image blatantly showing the problem of holes
Another possible solution could be to assign each integral coordinate the pixel intensity which is nearest to it. Though I haven't tried it out, according to literature, while the holes would fill up, the image starts displaying effects of aliasing. This brings us to our other alternative Inverse Warping.

Inverse Warping
In this method we do an inverse mapping to project each point in the target grid on the source grid, i.e the image plane of our friend. Then the pixel intensities are chosen based on a bilinear interpolation from the neighbouring pixels. Sounds complicated, right! Yes it is........No, I am kidding....its simple. Just look at the image below and go through the description. Then kick yourself if you don't get it right the first time :p

 When inverse mapping land you in a non-integer coordinate point
Say, the inverse homography landed you at a non-integer coordinate point $(p,q)$ in your friends image. The intuition is that the pixel intensity at this point should be a linear combination of the intensities at the corners with closer corners getting a higher weight in proportion to the closeness to this point. Thus the intensity at  $(p,q)$ is given by
\begin{align}
I=(1-\Delta x)(1-\Delta y) I(x,y) + (1-\Delta x)(\Delta y) I(x,y+1) \\
+ (\Delta x)(\Delta y) I(x+1,y+1) + (\Delta x)(1-\Delta y) I(x+1,y)
\end{align}

Now behold the beauty of this beast

 Brilliance of Inverse Warping
Isn't this a beauty!! You've got to admit this is kinda wicked :D....no ugly distortions....no holes....I feel like an artist looking at his creating. Nah...Lets scrap the sentimental talk.

Not only can you do such simple transformations, but more complicated transformations as well for example feast your eyes on the following results

 A more interesting Homography using Forward Warping

 The more interesting Homography using Inverse Warping
I would urge my readers to understand that while we are defining the Homography manually here , most applications such as Panorama Stitching requires the estimation of Homography using some matching keypoints in different images such as those given by SIFT descriptors. This knowledge renders much of the process discussed above unnecessary but of  course Homography estimation brings other challenges with itself. However, I feel that this exercise that we went through is particularly informative and useful to get a sense of what's going on.

Code shall be uploaded soon, it needs some serious cleaning and commenting to be useful to anybody :p

## Wednesday, 1 January 2014

### Seeing through Chaos: Noise Filtering

Mind is a powerful thing. It is both the cause of chaos in our lives and the source of our redemption from it.
This chaos which religion describes as an "Act of God", is known to Geeks as "Noise". Obviously Rockstars are oblivious to the fact that they are actually pleading for "Chaos" when they ask their audience to "Make some Noise \m/".

Today let us attempt to see through this veil of randomness and uncover the Signals hidden behind. By the way, a very prosperous and a happy new year to all my readers, if that makes you feel any better :p.

### Noise removal using Wiener Filter

A noisy image is an eyesore, yuck! So do we fold our hands and stare at it helplessly. No, we protest....vehemently. We oppose it, suppress it and humiliate it....yeah!! You can't disagree once you've seen this:
 Left: Original Image                                                    Right: Noisy Image
The noise that you are seeing here is called 'Additive White Gaussian Noise'. It is additive because the noise signal (yeah! noise is also a signal, a pathetic one at that but a signal indeed) is algebraically added to the pixel intensities. It is 'Gaussian' because the magnitude of noise at any particular pixel is Gaussian distributed random variable. It is 'white' because just as white light is composed of all possible wavelengths of light, white noise contains all possible frequency components i.e. its Power Spectral Density (PSD) is flat. But what the hell is 'Power Spectral Density' right? Let us dig deeper here because wiener filter stands on the pedestal of PSD and its estimation for the signals in question is absolutely essential.

## Power Spectral Density

The idea of PSD resonates with that of Fourier Transforms, in fact by definition for continuous time signals:

\begin{align}PSD(\omega)=E[|F(\omega)|^2] \end{align}

where $F(\omega)$ is the Fourier Transform of signal $f(t)$ and $E[.]$ denotes the expected value. Basically as the name suggests it is a measure of the power contributed by the different frequency components to the original signal. The task of finding the PSD for any deterministic signal such as an image is simple. Because images are discrete signals (at least on computer where the computation takes place), we shall use Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) instead of the continuous one. For deterministic images, such as the original cameraman image above:

\begin{align}PSD[m,n] = \frac{1}{MN}|F[m,n]|^2 \end{align}

Let me tell you a secret - Continuous-time Fourier Transform (CFT), Discrete-Time Fourier Transform (DTFT) and Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) used to give me a headache until recently when the concepts began to gel in. So, if you are passing through the same bad weather, may God bless you with one of my future posts :p. Here's a quick hand-wavy recap:

When a continuous time function is sampled, then in frequency domain its transform replicates after intervals of $\frac{2 \pi}{T}$. Further the transform undergoes both frequency scaling (by a factor of T) and amplitude scaling (by a factor of  1/T) where T is the time period. However for discrete computations in frequency domain in computers we need to sample even the DTFT and because of the periodicity property only the section between $[0, 2 \pi]$ is used. So in this interval for a 1-D signal, for example, the relation between DTFT ($F(\omega)$) and DFT $F[k]$ is given by:

$$F[k]=F(\omega)|_{\omega=\frac{2 \pi k}{N}}$$

As far as the noise is concerned, since we are dealing with AWGN, its PSD is simply the noise variance at all frequencies. What could be simpler than that right?

## The Wiener Filter

The idea of Wiener Filter is intuitive. We want to suppress those DFT coefficients where the Signal-to-Noise ratio is small while leaving those coefficients untouched where the Signal-to-Noise ratio is large. Wiener Filter is actually an optimal filter in the sense that it minimizes the mean squared error between the noisy signal and the underlying signal. A rigorous derivation is uploaded here.  But the final result i.e. the filter in frequency domain is give by:

$$H(\omega)=\frac{S_u}{S_u+S_\eta}$$

where $S_u$ and $S_\eta$ are the PSD of the original image and noise respectively. This was what the professor who taught me image processing, but who shall remain unnamed here, told me. And I was like: This dude must be crazy! How is it possible to find the PSD of the original image when we are given just the noisy image. But it turns out that a reasonable estimate can be obtained from the noisy image as well. Now I don't know if this is a standard practice but my approach was this:

The trick here is to first perform a Gaussian smoothing operation on the noisy image. This acts as a low pass filter and filters out the high frequency noise components. The PSD of the resulting image would then serve as a not-too-bad estimate of the original image. Of course, now there is a trade-off because Gaussian smoothing also smudges the image. More the smudge, more is the noise that would be filtered out and vice versa. Take your time to appreciate the results below and you can find the entire MATLAB code here.

 Noisy image after Gaussian smoothing operation
 Left: Noisy Image                       Right: Wiener Filtered Image
 Wiener Filtering using the PSD of original image
There was some gap between my last blog and this one. The reason being I promised you, my readers, that I would tell you how to filter out noise from a signal. I did not expect that I would run into practical issues which we seldom think about while trying to understand the theory. The point is I learnt a lot myself while preparing for this particular blog. Hope you enjoyed it and found it equally informative.