Alessandro Foi
Tampere University, Finland
Noise in imaging: focus on correlation and nonlinearity
Abstract
Understanding and characterizing noise is a foundational part of the design and analysis of an imaging system, and it is also essential for the development of the corresponding image processing modules. In this talk we consider broad classes of heteroskedastic image observations and specifically focus on the noise correlation, the noise anisotropy, and on the nonlinear effects that can arise when dealing with capture at low signal-to-noise ratio or when maximizing the coverage of a narrow dynamic range. We demonstrate possibly unexpected and perhaps counter-intuitive phenomena which, unless suitably modeled and accounted for, can significantly disrupt the noise analysis and other operations in an image processing pipeline. Instances of these phenomena are shown across various imaging and image processing systems used in biomedical, defense, security, as well as consumer applications, including x-ray tomography, infrared thermography, confocal fluorescence microscopy, and on-demand video streaming.
Speaker’s Bio
Alessandro Foi is Professor of Signal Processing at Tampere University (TAU), Finland. He leads the Signal and Image Restoration group and he is the director of TAU Imaging Research Platform.
He received the M.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, in 2001, the Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from the Politecnico di Milano in 2005, and the D.Sc.Tech. degree in Signal Processing from Tampere University of Technology, Finland, in 2007.
His research interests include mathematical and statistical methods for signal processing, functional and harmonic analysis, and computational modeling of the human visual system. His work focuses on spatially adaptive (anisotropic, nonlocal) algorithms for the restoration and enhancement of digital images, on noise modeling for imaging devices, and on the optimal design of statistical transformations for the stabilization, normalization, and analysis of random data.
He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.
He previously served as a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging and as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, and the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging.