MRI images are visually inspected by domain experts for the analysis and quantification of the tumorous tissues. Due to the large volumetric data, manual reporting on the images is subjective, cumbersome, and error prone. To address these problems, automatic image analysis tools are employed for tumor segmentation and other subsequent statistical analysis. However, prior to the tumor analysis and quantification, an important challenge lies in the pre-processing. In the present study, permutations of different pre-processing methods are comprehensively investigated. In particular, the study focused on Gibbs ringing artifact removal, bias field correction, intensity normalization, and adaptive histogram equalization (AHE). The pre-processed MRI data is then passed onto 3D U-Net for automatic segmentation of brain tumors. The segmentation results demonstrated the best performance with the combination of two techniques, i.e., Gibbs ringing artifact removal and bias-field correction. The proposed technique achieved mean dice score metrics of 0.91, 0.86, and 0.70 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The testing mean dice scores achieved by the system are 0.90, 0.83, and 0.71 for the whole tumor, core tumor, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The novelty of this work concerns a robust pre-processing sequence for improving the segmentation accuracy of MR images. The proposed method overcame the testing dice scores of the state-of-the-art methods. The results are benchmarked with the existing techniques used in the Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) 2018 challenge.

Dictionary learning algorithms have received widespread acceptance when it comes to data analysis and signal representations problems. These algorithms alternate between two stages: the sparse coding stage and dictionary update stage. In all existing dictionary learning algorithms the use of sparsity has been limited to the sparse coding stage while presenting differences in the dictionary update stage which can be achieved sequentially or in parallel. The singular value decomposition (SVD) has been successfully used for sequential dictionary update. In this paper we propose a dictionary learning algorithm that include a sparsity constraint also in the dictionary update stage. The cost function used to include sparsity in the dictionary update stage is derived using the link between SVD and rank one matrix approximation. The effectiveness of the proposed dictionary learning method is tested on synthetic data and an image processing application. The results reveal that including a sparsity constraint in the dictionary update stage is not a bad idea.

Bleed-through is a frequent, pervasive degradation in ancient manuscripts, which is caused by ink seeped from the opposite side of the sheet. Bleed-through, appearing as an extra interfering text, hinders document readability and makes it difficult to decipher the information contents. Digital image restoration techniques have been successfully employed to remove or significantly reduce this distortion. This paper proposes a two-step restoration method for documents affected by bleed-through, exploiting information from the recto and verso images. First, the bleed-through pixels are identified, based on a non-stationary, linear model of the two texts overlapped in the recto-verso pair. In the second step, a dictionary learning-based sparse image inpainting technique, with non-local patch grouping, is used to reconstruct the bleed-through-contaminated image information. An overcomplete sparse dictionary is learned from the bleed-through-free image patches, which is then used to estimate a befitting fill-in for the identified bleed-through pixels. The non-local patch similarity is employed in the sparse reconstruction of each patch, to enforce the local similarity. Thanks to the intrinsic image sparsity and non-local patch similarity, the natural texture of the background is well reproduced in the bleed-through areas, and even a possible overestimation of the bleed through pixels is effectively corrected, so that the original appearance of the document is preserved. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on the images of a popular database of ancient documents, and the results validate the performance of the proposed method compared to the state of the art.