JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, VOLUME 17, ISSUE 2, FEB 2013 35

A Framework for Removing Snow from an Image via Image Decomposition

Dhanashree Rajderkar and P.S.Mohod
Abstract Snowfall removal from an image is a challenging problem and has been recently investigated. In this paper, we propose a framework for snowfall removal via image decomposition based on Morphological component analysis. Using bilateral filter, the proposed method first decomposes an image into low frequency (LF) and high frequency (HF) parts. The high frequency part is then decompose into snow component and non snow component by performing dictionary learning and sparse coding.

Index TermsDictionary learning, image decomposition, morphological component analysis, snow removal, sparse representation.

1 INTRODUCTION

HERE are various types of weather conditions such as snow,rain,haze or fog will cause complex visual effects of spatial or temporal domains in images or videos[1].It may significantly degrade the performances on visual systems relying on image feature extraction[1]or visual attention modeling [1] such as image registration [1],event detection, object detection, tracking and recognition. Removing snow streaks is a challenging problem and has recently received much attention. We first briefly review current approaches of rain or snow removal and image denoising followed by our proposed method.

and diverse points of view. For example, spatial adaptive filters, partial differentiation, transfer-domain methods etc[4].Recently, sparse coding and over learned dictionaries has been proven to be effective and promising [4].By using K-SVD dictionary training algorithm[5],the image signals admit a sparse decomposition over redundant dictionary. Elad and Aharon [4] obtained a dictionary describing the image content effectively.They proposed two training options, where one is using the corrupted image and other one is training on a set of high-quality images.

1.1. A Visual System for Snow Detection And Removal

A model of the shape and appearance of a single rain or snow streak in the image space was developed in [2] to detect rain or snow streaks. Then, the amount of rain or snow in the video can be reduced or increased. The method proposed in [1], further utilize to detect and remove rain streaks via image decomposition technique. In this paper, dictionary learning and sparse coding technique is used based on morphological component analysis (MCA).The shape characteristics of rain streak for identifying and removing rain streaks from video is describe in [3].

1.3. Motivation For Removing Snow Streak

The research works on rain streak removal found in the literature.Removal of snow streak from an image was rarely investigated before.To extract image features some methods such as scale-invariant feature transform(SIFT) [6],speeded up robust feature(SURF) and Histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) are mainly used. The performances of gradient-based feature extraction can significantly degrade by rain streaks appearing in an image; because the rain streaks introduce time-varying gradients in similar direction and similarly in case snow streaks. It is found that HOG method gives better result than others. Visual attention model [1] computes a saliency at each location in the visual input that simulates which elements of a visual scene are likely to attract the attention of observer. It may degrade the performance if rain or snow streaks directly interact with the interested area in an image. Therefore single image based snow streak removal is desirable.

1.2 Image Noise Removal

Image noise removal is a challenging problem. The major goal of image noise removal is to design an algorithm that can remove noise from an image. Much of contributions for image denoising problem from many

Dhanashree Rajderkar , Mtech II year CSE(student) , G.H.R.I.E.T.W. , Nagpur ,India P.S.Mohod , Department of Computer Science and Engg.,G.H.R.I.E.T.W., R.T.M.Nagpur University,India

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1.4 Characteristics of Snow streaks

(a) Imaging a Single Streak Rain drops or snow streaks come down significantly and therefore appear as in the form of streak,[10].If we assume that it is a straight line with constant breadth as because of its constant velocity,camera distance is constant.Let b is the breadth of streak, h is the height of streak,a is the diameter of a drop that is z meters away from camera is given by

is defined as
(* + * +) 2 (2)

( (

) )
( ( ) )

(a) (b)

where is a regularization parameter.Generally,to decompose an image into snow component and non snow component wavelets and curvlets are used as the dictionary to represent geometric component. To represent textural component of the image global discrete cosine transform basic functions are used as dictionary. With respect to local dictionary D l , nm , represents sparse coefficients of patch , k=1,2,,N extracted from Is. Each patch can be extracted centralized with a pixel of Is and overlapped with adjacent patches. The energy function Es for local dictionary is as follows
E (I ) ( /2 || ) (3)

Where f is the focal length and e is the exposure time. (b) Statistical Property In a storm, there will be various sizes of snowflakes. [10]Size distribution are commonly as [9] for snowflakes. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In 2, we briefly review the concepts that are used in proposed system such as MCA based image decomposition, sparse coding and dictionary learning technique. Section 3 describes the propose system framework. In Section 4, only module is describe with results .Section 5, concludes this paper.

The MCA algorithm solve (1) by iterative performing for each component Is the following steps 1)update of the sparse coefficients i.e. this step performs sparse coding to solve or * + to minimize E (I ) while fixing or * + In this case, I is decompose into two parts Is where s=1,2 ; so that two dictionaries D1 and D2 are form which can be local or global dictionaries but should be incoherent i.e. D1 can provide sparse representation of I1 but not for I2 and vice versa. To decompose image components I into geometric component I1 and textural component I2 ,global wavelet or global curvlet is used as D1 and local curvlet or local wavelet is used as D2 .

2. MCA - BASED IMAGE DECOMPOSITION, 2.2 Sparse coding and Dictionary Learning DICTIONARY LEARNING, SPARSE CODING.
The major concept of MCA is to use the morphological diversity of different features of image data that is decompose and associate each component to form a dictionary of atoms. The conventional MCA based image decomposition techniques [7], sparse coding [8] and dictionary learning [5] techniques are briefly explained.

2.1 A. MCA Based Image Decomposition, Dictionary Learning, Sparse Coding

Let us consider an image I of N pixels is a superposition of S layers (known as morphological components), denoted by I , where Is denotes the sth component, such as the geometric or textural component * + of I. To decompose the image I into MCA algorithm [7] iteratively minimize the energy function.
E(*I + * + ) 2 I ( ) (1)

Sparse coding [4], a technique used to find out sparse representation for a signal with less number of non zero coefficient in a dictionary. The pioneering work in sparse coding proposed by Olshausen and Field [4].It states that a coding strategy that maximizes sparsely is sufficient for spatially localized oriented and band pass and learning algorithm is used to find sparse linear codes for natural scenes will develop a family of localized, oriented and band pass receptive fields. To construct a dictionary containing the local structures of textures for sparse representation of each patch extracted from textural component of an image.
( /2 ) (4)

where denotes the sparse coefficients corresponds to Is w.r.t Ds, is a regularization parameter and Es is a energy defined according to the type of Ds.For a global dictionary Dg , NM , energy function Es

where denotes the sparse coefficients of yk with respect to and is a regularization parameter. Equation (4) can be solved by applying dictionary learning algorithm such as KSVD or online dictionary learning algorithms where the sparse coding step is usually achieved via orthogonal matching pursuit. Finally, image decomposition is achieved by iteratively performing the MCA algorithm to solve Is and dictionary learning algorithm to learn Dls until convergence.

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3. PROPOSED SYSTEM FOR SNOW FALL REMOVAL

In the proposed system, the input image is a snowfall image is first decompose into low frequency and high frequency parts using bilateral filter [3].The most basic information will be retained in the LF part whereas other information will be retain in HF part. Then, we will perform the image decomposition based on MCA technique, on HF part so that it will further decompose into snow component and non snow component. In the decomposition step, HOG method is used to extract feature of each atom that are in dictionary and then divide the dictionary into two parts based on features that are extracted. Then, we perform sparse coding based on MCA technique to obtain geometric component in the HF part. We then integrate it with LF part of the image to obtain snow fall removed image.

5. CONCLUSION
We have proposed a method that can remove snow streaks from an image via image decomposition technique by performing sparse coding and dictionary learning algorithm.

REFERENCES

[1] Li-Wei-Kang,Chia-Wen Lin ,Yu- Hsiang Fu,Automatic Single Image Based Rain streaks removal via image decomposition , IEEE Trans.on Img Process., vol 21 no.4, pp1742 -1755, April 2012. [2] K. Garg and S. K. Nayar, Detection and removal of rain from videos, in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit., Jun. 2004, vol. 1, pp. 528535. [3] N. Brewer and N. Liu, Using the shape characteristics of rain to identify and remove rain from video, Lecture Notes Comput. Sci., vol. 5342/2008, pp. 451 458, 2008. [4] M. Elad and M. Aharon, Image denoising via sparse and redundant representations over learned dictionaries, IEEE Trans. Image Process., vol. 15, no. 12, pp. 3736 3745, Dec. 2006. [5] M. Aharon, M. Elad, and A. M. Bruckstein, The K -SVD: An algorithm for designing of overcomplete dictionaries for sparse representation, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 54, no. 11, pp. 4311 4322, Nov. 2006. [6] D. G. Lowe, Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints, Int. J. Comput. Vis., vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 91 110, Nov. 2004. [7] J. M. Fadili, J. L. Starck, J. Bobin, and Y. Moudden, Image decomposition and separation using sparse representations: An overview, Proc. IEEE, vol. 98, no. 6, pp. 983 994, Jun. 2010. [8] B. A. Olshausen and D. J. Field, Emergence of simple -cell receptive field properties by learning a sparse code for natural images, Nature, vol. 381, no. 6583, pp. 607 609, Jun. 1996. [9]A. Buades, B. Coll, and J. M. Morel, A review of image denoising algorithms, with a new one, Multisc. Model. Simul., vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 490530, 2005. [10] Bossu, N. Hautire, and J. P. Tarel, Rain or snow detection in image sequences through use of a histogram of orientation of streaks, Int. J.Comput. Vis., vol. 93, no. 3, pp. 348 367, Jul. 2011.

4. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS

Uptil now, following module is implemented and further process is going on : In Module-I, the input snowfall image is decompose into low frequency part and high frequency part using bilateral filter. The result of bilateral filter is better than simple Gaussian filter; because bilateral filter is the combination of smoothing filter and range filter. Bilateral filter also preserves edges with Euclidean distance.

(a)

(b)

(c) (d) Fig 1:(a)Original Image , (b) Grayscale Image ,(c) Low frequency Image , (d) High frequency Image

In next module, High frequency image is an input image, then extract patches based on its features and then make a dictionary of extracted patches using dictionary learning algorithm.

D.P.Rajderkar received B.E degree from R.T.M. Nagpur University,India, in 2008.Now,she is pursuing Mtech degree in computer science and Engineering from R.T.M.Nagpur University,India.Her area of interest is in Image processing .