arXiv subjects

Jean-Michel Morel

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-Michel Morel.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

SGSST: Scaling Gaussian Splatting StyleTransfer

Applying style transfer to a full 3D environment is a challenging task that has seen many developments since the advent of neural rendering. 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently pushed further many limits of neural rendering in terms of training speed and reconstruction quality. This work introduces SGSST: Scaling Gaussian Splatting Style Transfer, an optimization-based method to apply style transfer to pretrained 3DGS scenes. We demonstrate that a new multiscale loss based on global neural statistics, that we name SOS for Simultaneously Optimized Scales, enables style transfer to ultra-high resolution 3D scenes. Not only SGSST pioneers 3D scene style transfer at such high image resolutions, it also produces superior visual quality as assessed by thorough qualitative, quantitative and perceptual comparisons.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Structure Tensor Representation for Robust Oriented Object Detection

Oriented object detection predicts orientation in addition to object location and bounding box. Precisely predicting orientation remains challenging due to angular periodicity, which introduces boundary discontinuity issues and symmetry ambiguities. Inspired by classical works on edge and corner detection, this paper proposes to represent orientation in oriented bounding boxes as a structure tensor. This representation combines the strengths of Gaussian-based methods and angle-coder solutions, providing a simple yet efficient approach that is robust to angular periodicity issues without additional hyperparameters. Extensive evaluations across five datasets demonstrate that the proposed structure tensor representation outperforms previous methods in both fully-supervised and weakly supervised tasks, achieving high precision in angular prediction with minimal computational overhead. Thus, this work establishes structure tensors as a robust and modular alternative for encoding orientation in oriented object detection. We make our code publicly available, allowing for seamless integration into existing object detectors.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Bilateral Signal Warping for Left Ventricular Hypertrophy Diagnosis

Left Ventricular Hypertrophy (LVH) is a major cardiovascular risk factor, linked to heart failure, arrhythmia, and sudden cardiac death, often resulting from chronic stress like hypertension. Electrocardiography (ECG), while varying in sensitivity, is widely accessible and cost-effective for detecting LVH-related morphological changes. This work introduces a bilateral signal warping (BSW) approach to improve ECG-based LVH diagnosis. Our method creates a library of heartbeat prototypes from patients with consistent ECG patterns. After preprocessing to eliminate baseline wander and detect R peaks, we apply BSW to cluster heartbeats, generating prototypes for both normal and LVH classes. We compare each new record to these references to support diagnosis. Experimental results show promising potential for practical application in clinical settings.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Efficient single image non-uniformity correction algorithm

This paper introduces a new way to correct the non-uniformity (NU) in uncooled infrared-type images. The main defect of these uncooled images is the lack of a column (resp. line) time-dependent cross-calibration, resulting in a strong column (resp. line) and time dependent noise. This problem can be considered as a 1D flicker of the columns inside each frame. Thus, classic movie deflickering algorithms can be adapted, to equalize the columns (resp. the lines). The proposed method therefore applies to the series formed by the columns of an infrared image a movie deflickering algorithm. The obtained single image method works on static images, and therefore requires no registration, no camera motion compensation, and no closed aperture sensor equalization. Thus, the method has only one camera dependent parameter, and is landscape independent. This simple method will be compared to a state of the art total variation single image correction on raw real and simulated images. The method is real time, requiring only two operations per pixel. It involves no test-pattern calibration and produces no "ghost artifacts".

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Real-Time Localization and Bimodal Point Pattern Analysis of Palms Using UAV Imagery

Understanding the spatial distribution of palms within tropical forests is essential for effective ecological monitoring, conservation strategies, and the sustainable integration of natural forest products into local and global supply chains. However, the analysis of remotely sensed data in these environments faces significant challenges, such as overlapping palm and tree crowns, uneven shading across the canopy surface, and the heterogeneous nature of the forest landscapes, which often affect the performance of palm detection and segmentation algorithms. To overcome these issues, we introduce PalmDSNet, a deep learning framework for real-time detection, segmentation, and counting of canopy palms. Additionally, we employ a bimodal reproduction algorithm that simulates palm spatial propagation to further enhance the understanding of these point patterns using PalmDSNet's results. We used UAV-captured imagery to create orthomosaics from 21 sites across western Ecuadorian tropical forests, covering a gradient from the everwet Chocó forests near Colombia to the drier forests of southwestern Ecuador. Expert annotations were used to create a comprehensive dataset, including 7,356 bounding boxes on image patches and 7,603 palm centers across five orthomosaics, encompassing a total area of 449 hectares. By combining PalmDSNet with the bimodal reproduction algorithm, which optimizes parameters for both local and global spatial variability, we effectively simulate the spatial distribution of palms in diverse and dense tropical environments, validating its utility for advanced applications in tropical forest monitoring and remote sensing analysis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Formalization of Image Vectorization by Region Merging

Image vectorization converts raster images into vector graphics composed of regions separated by curves. Typical vectorization methods first define the regions by grouping similar colored regions via color quantization, then approximate their boundaries by Bezier curves. In that way, the raster input is converted into an SVG format parameterizing the regions' colors and the Bezier control points. This compact representation has many graphical applications thanks to its universality and resolution-independence. In this paper, we remark that image vectorization is nothing but an image segmentation, and that it can be built by fine to coarse region merging. Our analysis of the problem leads us to propose a vectorization method alternating region merging and curve smoothing. We formalize the method by alternate operations on the dual and primal graph induced from any domain partition. In that way, we address a limitation of current vectorization methods, which separate the update of regional information from curve approximation. We formalize region merging methods by associating them with various gain functionals, including the classic Beaulieu-Goldberg and Mumford-Shah functionals. More generally, we introduce and compare region merging criteria involving region number, scale, area, and internal standard deviation. We also show that the curve smoothing, implicit in all vectorization methods, can be performed by the shape-preserving affine scale space. We extend this flow to a network of curves and give a sufficient condition for the topological preservation of the segmentation. The general vectorization method that follows from this analysis shows explainable behaviors, explicitly controlled by a few intuitive parameters. It is experimentally compared to state-of-the-art software and proved to have comparable or superior fidelity and cost efficiency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

How to Best Combine Demosaicing and Denoising?

Image demosaicing and denoising play a critical role in the raw imaging pipeline. These processes have often been treated as independent, without considering their interactions. Indeed, most classic denoising methods handle noisy RGB images, not raw images. Conversely, most demosaicing methods address the demosaicing of noise free images. The real problem is to jointly denoise and demosaic noisy raw images. But the question of how to proceed is still not yet clarified. In this paper, we carry-out extensive experiments and a mathematical analysis to tackle this problem by low complexity algorithms. Indeed, both problems have been only addressed jointly by end-to-end heavy weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are currently incompatible with low power portable imaging devices and remain by nature domain (or device) dependent. Our study leads us to conclude that, with moderate noise, demosaicing should be applied first, followed by denoising. This requires a simple adaptation of classic denoising algorithms to demosaiced noise, which we justify and specify. Although our main conclusion is ``demosaic first, then denoise'', we also discover that for high noise, there is a moderate PSNR gain by a more complex strategy: partial CFA denoising followed by demosaicing, and by a second denoising on the RGB image. These surprising results are obtained by a black-box optimization of the pipeline, which could be applied to any other pipeline. We validate our results on simulated and real noisy CFA images obtained from several benchmarks.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Scaling Painting Style Transfer

Neural style transfer (NST) is a deep learning technique that produces an unprecedentedly rich style transfer from a style image to a content image. It is particularly impressive when it comes to transferring style from a painting to an image. NST was originally achieved by solving an optimization problem to match the global statistics of the style image while preserving the local geometric features of the content image. The two main drawbacks of this original approach is that it is computationally expensive and that the resolution of the output images is limited by high GPU memory requirements. Many solutions have been proposed to both accelerate NST and produce images with larger size. However, our investigation shows that these accelerated methods all compromise the quality of the produced images in the context of painting style transfer. Indeed, transferring the style of a painting is a complex task involving features at different scales, from the color palette and compositional style to the fine brushstrokes and texture of the canvas. This paper provides a solution to solve the original global optimization for ultra-high resolution (UHR) images, enabling multiscale NST at unprecedented image sizes. This is achieved by spatially localizing the computation of each forward and backward passes through the VGG network. Extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons, as well as a \textcolor{coverletter}{perceptual study}, show that our method produces style transfer of unmatched quality for such high-resolution painting styles. By a careful comparison, we show that state-of-the-art fast methods are still prone to artifacts, thus suggesting that fast painting style transfer remains an open problem. Source code is available at https://github.com/bgalerne/scaling_painting_style_transfer.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Exploring Robust Features for Few-Shot Object Detection in Satellite Imagery

The goal of this paper is to perform object detection in satellite imagery with only a few examples, thus enabling users to specify any object class with minimal annotation. To this end, we explore recent methods and ideas from open-vocabulary detection for the remote sensing domain. We develop a few-shot object detector based on a traditional two-stage architecture, where the classification block is replaced by a prototype-based classifier. A large-scale pre-trained model is used to build class-reference embeddings or prototypes, which are compared to region proposal contents for label prediction. In addition, we propose to fine-tune prototypes on available training images to boost performance and learn differences between similar classes, such as aircraft types. We perform extensive evaluations on two remote sensing datasets containing challenging and rare objects. Moreover, we study the performance of both visual and image-text features, namely DINOv2 and CLIP, including two CLIP models specifically tailored for remote sensing applications. Results indicate that visual features are largely superior to vision-language models, as the latter lack the necessary domain-specific vocabulary. Lastly, the developed detector outperforms fully supervised and few-shot methods evaluated on the SIMD and DIOR datasets, despite minimal training parameters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Fast, nonlocal and neural: a lightweight high quality solution to image denoising

With the widespread application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the traditional model based denoising algorithms are now outperformed. However, CNNs face two problems. First, they are computationally demanding, which makes their deployment especially difficult for mobile terminals. Second, experimental evidence shows that CNNs often over-smooth regular textures present in images, in contrast to traditional non-local models. In this letter, we propose a solution to both issues by combining a nonlocal algorithm with a lightweight residual CNN. This solution gives full latitude to the advantages of both models. We apply this framework to two GPU implementations of classic nonlocal algorithms (NLM and BM3D) and observe a substantial gain in both cases, performing better than the state-of-the-art with low computational requirements. Our solution is between 10 and 20 times faster than CNNs with equivalent performance and attains higher PSNR. In addition the final method shows a notable gain on images containing complex textures like the ones of the MIT Moire dataset.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2023

Joint Demosaicking and Denoising Benefits from a Two-stage Training Strategy

Image demosaicking and denoising are the first two key steps of the color image production pipeline. The classical processing sequence has for a long time consisted of applying denoising first, and then demosaicking. Applying the operations in this order leads to oversmoothing and checkerboard effects. Yet, it was difficult to change this order, because once the image is demosaicked, the statistical properties of the noise are dramatically changed and hard to handle by traditional denoising models. In this paper, we address this problem by a hybrid machine learning method. We invert the traditional color filter array (CFA) processing pipeline by first demosaicking and then denoising. Our demosaicking algorithm, trained on noiseless images, combines a traditional method and a residual convolutional neural network (CNN). This first stage retains all known information, which is the key point to obtain faithful final results. The noisy demosaicked image is then passed through a second CNN restoring a noiseless full-color image. This pipeline order completely avoids checkerboard effects and restores fine image detail. Although CNNs can be trained to solve jointly demosaicking-denoising end-to-end, we find that this two-stage training performs better and is less prone to failure. It is shown experimentally to improve on the state of the art, both quantitatively and in terms of visual quality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Reducing False Alarms in Video Surveillance by Deep Feature Statistical Modeling

Detecting relevant changes is a fundamental problem of video surveillance. Because of the high variability of data and the difficulty of properly annotating changes, unsupervised methods dominate the field. Arguably one of the most critical issues to make them practical is to reduce their false alarm rate. In this work, we develop a method-agnostic weakly supervised a-contrario validation process, based on high dimensional statistical modeling of deep features, to reduce the number of false alarms of any change detection algorithm. We also raise the insufficiency of the conventionally used pixel-wise evaluation, as it fails to precisely capture the performance needs of most real applications. For this reason, we complement pixel-wise metrics with object-wise metrics and evaluate the impact of our approach at both pixel and object levels, on six methods and several sequences from different datasets. Experimental results reveal that the proposed a-contrario validation is able to largely reduce the number of false alarms at both pixel and object levels.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Optimal and Efficient Binary Questioning for Human-in-the-Loop Annotation

Even though data annotation is extremely important for interpretability, research and development of artificial intelligence solutions, most research efforts such as active learning or few-shot learning focus on the sample efficiency problem. This paper studies the neglected complementary problem of getting annotated data given a predictor. For the simple binary classification setting, we present the spectrum ranging from optimal general solutions to practical efficient methods. The problem is framed as the full annotation of a binary classification dataset with the minimal number of yes/no questions when a predictor is available. For the case of general binary questions the solution is found in coding theory, where the optimal questioning strategy is given by the Huffman encoding of the possible labelings. However, this approach is computationally intractable even for small dataset sizes. We propose an alternative practical solution based on several heuristics and lookahead minimization of proxy cost functions. The proposed solution is analysed, compared with optimal solutions and evaluated on several synthetic and real-world datasets. On these datasets, the method allows a significant improvement ($23-86\%$) in annotation efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

SING: A Plug-and-Play DNN Learning Technique

We propose SING (StabIlized and Normalized Gradient), a plug-and-play technique that improves the stability and generalization of the Adam(W) optimizer. SING is straightforward to implement and has minimal computational overhead, requiring only a layer-wise standardization of the gradients fed to Adam(W) without introducing additional hyper-parameters. We support the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach by showing improved results on a wide range of architectures, problems (such as image classification, depth estimation, and natural language processing), and in combination with other optimizers. We provide a theoretical analysis of the convergence of the method, and we show that by virtue of the standardization, SING can escape local minima narrower than a threshold that is inversely proportional to the network's depth.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Collaborative Blind Image Deblurring

Blurry images usually exhibit similar blur at various locations across the image domain, a property barely captured in nowadays blind deblurring neural networks. We show that when extracting patches of similar underlying blur is possible, jointly processing the stack of patches yields superior accuracy than handling them separately. Our collaborative scheme is implemented in a neural architecture with a pooling layer on the stack dimension. We present three practical patch extraction strategies for image sharpening, camera shake removal and optical aberration correction, and validate the proposed approach on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks. For each blur instance, the proposed collaborative strategy yields significant quantitative and qualitative improvements.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Global Tracking and Quantification of Oil and Gas Methane Emissions from Recurrent Sentinel-2 Imagery

Methane (CH4) emissions estimates from top-down studies over oil and gas basins have revealed systematic under-estimation of CH4 emissions in current national inventories. Sparse but extremely large amounts of CH4 from oil and gas production activities have been detected across the globe, resulting in a significant increase of the overall O&G contribution. However, attribution to specific facilities remains a major challenge unless high-resolution images provide the sufficient granularity within O&G basin. In this paper, we monitor known oil-and-gas infrastructures across the globe using recurrent Sentinel-2 imagery to detect and quantify more than 800 CH4 emissions. In combination with emissions estimates from airborne and Sentinel-5P measurements, we demonstrate the robustness of the fit to a power law from 0.1 tCH4/hr to 600 tCH4/hr. We conclude here that the prevalence of ultra-emitters (> 25tCH4/hr) detected globally by Sentinel-5P directly relates to emission occurrences below its detection threshold. Similar power law coefficients arise from several major oil and gas producers but noticeable differences in emissions magnitudes suggest large differences in maintenance practices and infrastructures across countries.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2022

Can neural networks extrapolate? Discussion of a theorem by Pedro Domingos

Neural networks trained on large datasets by minimizing a loss have become the state-of-the-art approach for resolving data science problems, particularly in computer vision, image processing and natural language processing. In spite of their striking results, our theoretical understanding about how neural networks operate is limited. In particular, what are the interpolation capabilities of trained neural networks? In this paper we discuss a theorem of Domingos stating that "every machine learned by continuous gradient descent is approximately a kernel machine". According to Domingos, this fact leads to conclude that all machines trained on data are mere kernel machines. We first extend Domingo's result in the discrete case and to networks with vector-valued output. We then study its relevance and significance on simple examples. We find that in simple cases, the "neural tangent kernel" arising in Domingos' theorem does provide understanding of the networks' predictions. Furthermore, when the task given to the network grows in complexity, the interpolation capability of the network can be effectively explained by Domingos' theorem, and therefore is limited. We illustrate this fact on a classic perception theory problem: recovering a shape from its boundary.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Fast Two-step Blind Optical Aberration Correction

The optics of any camera degrades the sharpness of photographs, which is a key visual quality criterion. This degradation is characterized by the point-spread function (PSF), which depends on the wavelengths of light and is variable across the imaging field. In this paper, we propose a two-step scheme to correct optical aberrations in a single raw or JPEG image, i.e., without any prior information on the camera or lens. First, we estimate local Gaussian blur kernels for overlapping patches and sharpen them with a non-blind deblurring technique. Based on the measurements of the PSFs of dozens of lenses, these blur kernels are modeled as RGB Gaussians defined by seven parameters. Second, we remove the remaining lateral chromatic aberrations (not contemplated in the first step) with a convolutional neural network, trained to minimize the red/green and blue/green residual images. Experiments on both synthetic and real images show that the combination of these two stages yields a fast state-of-the-art blind optical aberration compensation technique that competes with commercial non-blind algorithms.

eess.IV↗