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Acquiring images of the same anatomy with multiple different contrasts increases the diversity of diagnostic information available in an MR exam. Yet, the scan time limitations may prohibit the acquisition of certain contrasts, and some contrasts may be corrupted by noise and artifacts. In such cases, the ability to synthesize unacquired or corrupted contrasts can improve diagnostic utility. For multi-contrast synthesis, the current methods learn a nonlinear intensity transformation between the source and target images, either via nonlinear regression or deterministic neural networks. These methods can, in turn, suffer from the loss of structural details in synthesized images. Here, in this paper, we propose a new approach for multi-contrast MRI synthesis based on conditional generative adversarial networks. The proposed approach preserves intermediate-to-high frequency details via an adversarial loss, and it offers enhanced synthesis performance via pixel-wise and perceptual losses for registered multi-contrast images and a cycle-consistency loss for unregistered images. Information from neighboring cross-sections are utilized to further improve synthesis quality. Demonstrations on T 1-and T 2-weighted images from healthy subjects and patients clearly indicate the superior performance of the proposed approach compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods. Our synthesis approach can help improve the quality and versatility Manuscript

To detect visually salient elements of complex natural scenes, computational bottom-up saliency models commonly examine several feature channels such as color and orientation in parallel. They compute a separate feature map for each channel and then linearly combine these maps to produce a master saliency map. However, only a few studies have investigated how different feature dimensions contribute to the overall visual saliency. We address this integration issue and propose to use covariance matrices of simple image features (known as region covariance descriptors in the computer vision community; Tuzel, Porikli, & Meer, 2006) as meta-features for saliency estimation. As lowdimensional representations of image patches, region covariances capture local image structures better than standard linear filters, but more importantly, they naturally provide nonlinear integration of different features by modeling their correlations. We also show that first-order statistics of features could be easily incorporated to the proposed approach to improve the performance. Our experimental evaluation on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-art models on various tasks including prediction of human eye fixations, salient object detection, and image-retargeting.

Automatic description generation from natural images is a challenging problem that has recently received a large amount of interest from the computer vision and natural language processing communities. In this survey, we classify the existing approaches based on how they conceptualize this problem, viz., models that cast description as either generation problem or as a retrieval problem over a visual or multimodal representational space. We provide a detailed review of existing models, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, we give an overview of the benchmark image datasets and the evaluation measures that have been developed to assess the quality of machine-generated image descriptions. Finally we extrapolate future directions in the area of automatic image description generation.

Input imageStructure component Texture component AbstractRecent years have witnessed the emergence of new image smoothing techniques which have provided new insights and raised new questions about the nature of this well-studied problem. Specifically, these models separate a given image into its structure and texture layers by utilizing non-gradient based definitions for edges or special measures that distinguish edges from oscillations. In this study, we propose an alternative yet simple image smoothing approach which depends on covariance matrices of simple image features, aka the region covariances. The use of second order statistics as a patch descriptor allows us to implicitly capture local structure and texture information and makes our approach particularly effective for structure extraction from texture. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed approach leads to better image decompositions as compared to the state-of-the-art methods and preserves prominent edges and shading well. Moreover, we also demonstrate the applicability of our approach on some image editing and manipulation tasks such as image abstraction, texture and detail enhancement, image composition, inverse halftoning and seam carving.