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A linear prefilter for image sampling with ringing artifact control

A linear prefilter for image sampling with ringing artifact control
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  ALINEARPREFILTERFORIMAGESAMPLINGWITHRINGINGARTIFACTCONTROL G.Blanchet   1 , 2  , L.Moisan  1 , 2  , B.Roug´ e  2 , 31 MAP5, Universit´e Paris 5, France 2 CMLA, ´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure de Cachan, France 3 Centre National d’´Etudes Spatiales, Toulouse, France {  blanchet, moisan, rouge  } ABSTRACT When sampling a continuous image or subsampling a dis-crete image, aliasing artifacts can be controlled by ﬁlteringthe data prior to sampling. Bandlimiting ﬁlters completelyavoid aliasing artifacts, but have to ﬁnd a compromise be-tween blur and ringing artifacts. In this paper, we propose anew joint deﬁnition of blur/ringing artifacts, that associatesto a given bandlimited preﬁlter its so-called  Spread-Ringingcurve . We then build a set of ﬁlters yielding the optimalblur/ringing compromise according to the previous deﬁni-tion. We show on experiments that such ﬁlters yield sharperimages for a given level of ringing artifact. 1. INTRODUCTION Producing a high quality low-resolution image from a high-resolution one, or building a high quality image from a con-tinuousmodelbothrequireagoodunderstandingofthesam-pling process. The solution to avoid aliasing artifacts, thatmay introduce dramatic texture changes, losses of connect-edness or staircase effects, has been given in 1949 by Shan-non [1]: aliasing can be avoided by bandlimiting the inputimage (that is, setting to 0 its high frequency components),or, equivalently, by ﬁltering the image with a  sinc  ﬁlter. Un-fortunately this ﬁlter oscillates with slow decay, and intro-duces unwanted oscillations in the vicinity of sharp edges.Since then, other ﬁlters were developed such as splines [2],prolate [3] or Ces`aro ﬁlter [4] but the necessary trade-off between blur and ringing they introduce was never reallyevaluated.In the literature, the ringing artifact (sometimes referredto –unproperly– as the Gibbs phenomenon [5]) is often de-scribed as noise and is measured with the SNR [6]. Morespeciﬁcmeasuresofringing, liketheperceptualringingmet-ric [7] and the visible ringing metric [8], manage to controlthe amount of ringing artifacts put in a signal, but do not tryto deﬁne the ringing phenomenon by itself.In this paper, we propose a joint deﬁnition of ringingand blur artifacts, yielding what we call a  Spread-Ringingcurve  (Section 2). This curve allows us to compare therelative sharpness of classical bandlimited preﬁlter for anygiven level of ringing (see Fig. 5). In Section 3 we numer-ically design an optimal ﬁlter ( Spread-Ringing  ﬁlter (SR))that minimizes both ringing and blur artifacts, and compareit with other ﬁlters (Fig. 5). By preserving better edges,this ﬁlter reduces the deterioration of image quality usuallyobserved with classical ﬁlters, as shown by the image ex-periment reported on Fig. 3 and 4. 2. THESPREAD-RINGINGCURVE In all the following, we shall only consider 1D signals andﬁlters. Associated 2D ﬁlters for images will be built in aseparable way. Let us ﬁrst deﬁne the set of bandlimited sig-nals by B W   =  { g  ∈  L 2 ( R ) ,  supp (ˆ g )  ⊂  [ − W,W  ] } , ˆ g  standing for the Fourier Transform of   g . The ringing arti-fact may occur when a signal  f   is projected onto  B W   (fre-quency cutoff), or more generally when it is  approximated  by a signal  g  ∈  B W  . We propose the following deﬁnition. Deﬁnition1  When we approximate a signal  f   ∈  L 2 ( R ) by a bandlimited signal  g  ∈  B W   ,  g  may have additionaloscillations the sampled signal  f  ( kπ/W  )  does not have:this is the  continuous ringing phenomenon . Note that the  discrete ringing phenomenon  could be deﬁnedas well by considering only oscillations of the sampled sig-nal  g ( kπ/W  ) . Now following Deﬁnition 1, we would liketo deﬁne a way to  measure  ringing artifacts, in order to beable to constrain them to a non-perceptible level (that is,below the image noise level).Let us consider a ﬁlter  ϕ  ∈  B W  , and apply it to theHeaviside function ( H  ), yielding a new signal  g  =  H   ∗  ϕ .Two phenomena may appear for g  : ﬁrst, the transition from0 to 1 has a certain spread; second, oscillations may appeararound this transition. Deﬁning a measure only for theseoscillations (ringing) is difﬁcult because in general there is  S10 . 2R2R Fig. 1 .  D S,R natural way to deﬁne the transition domain (spread) of  g . This is why we choose to simultaneously measure thespread of the transition ( S  ) and the amplitude of the oscilla-tions outside the transition domain ( R ) by constraining thegraph of   g ,  Γ g  =  { ( x,g ( x ));  x  ∈  R }  to be contained in acertain domain (Fig. 1). Deﬁnition 2  We denote  D S,R  the subset of   R 2 deﬁned by D S,R  =  x ≤− S 2  and   | y |≤ R ( x,y )  or  | x |≤  S 2  and   − R ≤ y  ≤ 1 +  R or   x ≥  S 2  and   | 1 − y |≤ R  . We observe that a small R prevents too large oscillationsof  g , while a small S   ensures a sharp edge approximation of the discontinuity of   H  . Hence, the couple  ( S,R )  reﬂectsthe blur/ringing trade-off to be satisﬁed by  g . This leads to Deﬁnition 3  The Spread-Ringing domain associated to a ﬁlter   ϕ  ∈  B W   is D ( ϕ ) =  { ( S,R )  ∈  (0 , + ∞ ); Γ ϕ ∗ H   ⊂  D S,R } .  (1) The Spread-Ringing curve associated to  ϕ  is the boundaryof   D ( ϕ ) . If   ( S,R )  ∈  D ( ϕ ) , so does  ( S   +  p,R  +  q  ) . So theboundary of   D ( ϕ )  is obtained by taking the minimal pos-sible value of   R  for any ﬁxed  S  , or the minimal value of   S  for a ﬁxed  R . The Spread-Ringing curve can be describedby the graph of a function r ϕ ( S  ) = min { R  ∈  (0 , + ∞ );( S,R )  ∈  D ( ϕ ) } . Thisdeﬁnitionofringinghasthedrawbackthatnouniquevalue of  S   and R are associated to a given ﬁlter since, as wementioned before, it is difﬁcult to distinguish the edge fromthe ringing near the transition. However, this constructionhas the advantage to remain very general, since it does notrely on any arbitrary threshold. Moreover, Deﬁnition 3 canbe generalized to a  family  of ﬁlters  ϕ α  ( α  being in generala real parameter) and still yields a single  Spread-Ringingcurve , as speciﬁed in Deﬁnition 4  The Spread-Ringing domain associated to a family of ﬁlters  ( ϕ α ) α ∈ A  is D (( ϕ α ) α ∈ A ) =  α ∈ A D ( ϕ α ) .  (2)  Its Spread-Ringing curve is the associated boundary. 3. SR FILTERS We now build a family of bandlimited ﬁlters  ( ϕ S  ) , called SR ﬁlters , having the best possible  Spread-ringing curve .These ﬁlters have minimal ringing  R  for a ﬁxed spread  S  ,or equivalently, minimal spread S   for a ﬁxed ringing R . Forconvexity reasons, this family exists and is unique. For each S  , ϕ S   can be computed by the following iterative algorithm:set  ϕ  =  δ  0  (Dirac)assign a large value to  R repeatset  ϕ S   =  ϕ set  N   = 1 repeatforce  Γ ϕ ∗ H   ⊂  D S,R  by thresholdingforce  ϕ  ∈  B W  , that is  ˆ ϕ ( ξ  ) = 0  for  ξ   ∈  [ − W,W  ] set  N   =  N   + 1 until  convergence test   or  N > N  max reduce  R until  N > N  max The  convergence test   is satisﬁed when the two forcingsteps have small enough effects on  ϕ , that is, when the ﬁrstforcing step changes  ϕ  by less than  ε 1  (according to  L ∞ norm) and the second forcing step changes  ϕ  by less than ε 2  (according to the  L 2 norm). In practice, we checked thatconvergence was undoubtedly attained with  N  max  = 10000 and  ε 1  =  ε 2  = 0 . 001 .Note that the value of  W   is arbitrary since different val-ues of   W   simply mean different scales. Numerically, weused 1024 samples to represent  ϕ  and chose a frequencycutoff corresponding to a reduction by a factor 16.WhenlookingatSRﬁlters(obtainedwiththisalgorithm),we noticed that their Fourier transform was real symmetric(as expected), but not unimodal (that is, not both increasingon R − and decreasing on R + ), due to large weights on thefrequencies near  W   (and  − W  ). This phenomenon, due tothe fact that the ringing is controlled through a  L ∞ norm,can be undesired in some applications (since for example,natural images generally have unimodal spectra). It canbe avoided by building  unimodal SR ﬁlters  (see Fig. 2),obtained by adding a third forcing step in the algorithm(between the  D S,R  forcing step and the  B W   one) whichchanges  ˆ ϕ  into its  L 2 unimodal regression.  Remark:  We chose to control the ringing with the  L ∞ norm (instead of   L 1 or  L 2 norms) because our perceptionof images is more sensitive to large local overshoots thanto small oscillations (hidden by image noise or textures)spread on a large domain. In that sense, the characteriza-tion of ringing we proposed is speciﬁc to images and maynot be adequate in a general signal processing framework. W       T      F       (       f       i       l      t     e     r       ) frequencyS=2.5S=2S=1.5S=1 Fig.2 .  Some unimodal SR ﬁlters in Fourier domain 4. COMPARISONWITHCLASSICALFILTERS We compare the results of the SR ﬁlters with the followingclassical ﬁlters: •  sinc  ﬁlter:  ∀ ξ   ∈ R ,   sinc( ξ  ) = 1 [ − W,W  ] ( ξ  ) . •  Frequency truncated triangle ( α  ∈  [0 , 1] ):   T  α ( ξ  ) =  1 +  α − 1 W   | ξ  |  · 1 [ − W,W  ] ( ξ  ) •  Cosine ﬁlter ( α  ∈ R ):   C  α ( ξ  ) = 1 + cos( αξ  )2  · 1 [ − W,W  ] ( ξ  ) •  Prolate [3] and bandlimited Gaussian ﬁlters.As expected, SR ﬁlters (Fig. 5) show better results thanothertestedﬁlters. Theyintroducelessringingforanygivenedge spread. The unimodal constraint reduces the perfor-mance of the ﬁlter, as the  Spread-Ringing curve  of the uni-modal ﬁlter (a) is on the right hand side of the  Spread- Ringing curve  of the non unimodal ﬁlter (b). This diver-gence gets magniﬁed for small spread values.Among other ﬁlters, we observe two groups. The ﬁrstgroup (c,d,e) contains ﬁlters that give relatively good resultsin comparison with the SR ﬁlter. For a spread value smallerthan 2 pixels (which is a common level of sharpness), theygive very similar results, especially the prolate (c) and thecosine ﬁlter (d). The ﬁlters of the second group (f,g) per-form poorly as they produce a high level of ringing. 5. EXPERIMENTS We now apply SR ﬁlters to a natural image. We generalizethe 1D ﬁlter to 2D by using a separable convolution alongboth coordinates. Fig. 3 shows results obtained on a sub-part  (512  ×  512)  of a natural image. In this experiment, Line 130 Fig.3 .  The reference high-resolution (not bandlimited) town im-age  I   (bottom row) is preﬁltered with the prolate ﬁlter (yieldingthe top left image:  I  P  ) and with the SR ﬁlter (top right image: I  SR ). One can see that the white roof is better preserved with theSR ﬁlter (transitions look sharper). we chose the SR ﬁlter corresponding to  R  = 0 . 012 , allow-ing  1 . 2%  of overshoot with respect to the transition value,whichapproximatelycorrespondstothelevel of noiseof theimage. The convolution of the srcinal high resolution im-age (bottom of Fig. 3) was made with this SR ﬁlter and witha prolate ﬁlter (with same value of   R ) as a comparison. Aspredicted by the SR curves, the prolate ﬁlter yields a moreblurry image, as shown on Fig. 3 and 4. 0500100015002000250030003500400050 100 150 200 250 300    G  r  e  y   l  e  v  e   l pixelsOriginalProlateSR filter Fig. 4 .  Line 130 from the images of Fig. 3 near the whiteroof. The amplitude of the transitions are better preserved withthe SR ﬁlter than with the prolate. The difference between  I   andboth  I  P   and  I  SR  conﬁrms the improvement:  || I   −  I  P  || 1  = 90 , || I   −  I  SR || 1  = 83 ,  || I   −  I  P  || 2  = 150 ,  || I   −  I  SR || 2  = 137 .    R   i  n  g   i  n  g   R   (   M  a  x   i  m  u  m    O  v  e  r  s   h  o  o   t   ) Spread S (pixels)(c)(b)(a)(g)(f)(d)(e)SR unimodal filter (a)SR filter (not unimodal) (b)Prolate (c)cos (Fourier domain) (d)Gaussian (e)truncated triangle (Fourier domain) (f)sinc (g) Fig. 5 .  Spread-Ringing curves  of some bandlimited low-pass ﬁlters. These curves display the trade-off between ringing andblur artifacts for each ﬁlter. This representation incidentally shows that bandlimited Gaussian ﬁlters perform slightly betterthan prolate ﬁlters for small spreads ( S <  2 . 5  pixels), which are the most useful values in practice. As expected, SR ﬁltersachieve the best compromise (more than  20%  better than the others for  S   = 1 . 5  pixels). 6. CONCLUSION We introduced a joint measure of blur and ringing artifactsforbandlimitingﬁlters, andbuiltSRﬁltersminimizingtheseartifacts. Compared to classical ﬁlters, SR ﬁlters yield per-ceptible improvements when bandlimiting an image beforesampling, which could be interesting for applications re-quiring high quality image reduction. This approach alsopushes back the frontier of attainable aliasing/blur/ringingcompromises in image formation processes. In this paper,2D ﬁlters are built in a separable way, but generalization tonon-separable ﬁlters (radially symmetric or not) could beinvestigated as well. 7. REFERENCES [1] C. E. Shannon, “Communications in the presence of noise”,  Proc.of the IRE  , vol. 37, pp. 10-21, 1949.[2] P. Th´evenaz, T. Blu, M. Unser , “Image Interpola-tion and Resampling”,  Handbook of Medical Imaging,Processing and Analysis , I.N. Bankman Ed., AcademicPress, pp. 393-420, 2000.[3] D. Slepian, “Prolate Spheroidal Wave functions,Fourier Analysis, and Uncertainty- V: The DiscreteCase”,  Bell System Technical Journal , 1978.[4] A. J. Jerri,  The Gibbs Phenomenon in Fourier Analy-sis, Splines and Wavelet Approximations , Kluwer Aca-demic, 1998.[5] E. Hewitt, R. Hewitt, “The Gibbs-Wilbraham phe-nomenon: An episode in Fourier Analysis”,  Hist. Exact Sci. , pp. 129-160, 1979 .[6] A. Mu˜noz, T. Blu, M. Unser “ l  p -Multiresolution Anal-ysis: How to Reduce Ringing and Sparsify the Error”,  IEEE Trans. Image Process. , vol. 11:6, 2002.[7] P. Marziliano, F. Dufaux, S. Winkler, T. Ebrahimi,“Perceptual Blur and Ringing Metrics: Application toJPEG2000”,  SPIC  , vol. 19, pp. 163-172, 2004.[8] S.H. Oguz,  Morphological post-ﬁltering of ringing and lost data concealment in generalized lapped orthogonaltransform based image and video coding , Ph.D disser-tation, Univ of Wisconsin, Madison, 1999.
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