Mathematical Image Analysis Group, Saarland University

Welcome to the homepage of the lecture

Image Processing and Computer Vision

Winter term 2013 / 2014

Image Processing and Computer Vision

Prof. Joachim Weickert
Office hour: Tuesday, 14:15 - 15:15.

Coordinator of tutorials: Pascal Peter

Winter Term 2013 / 2014

Lectures (4h) with theoretical and programming assignments (2h);
(9 ETCS points)

Lectures: Tuesday and Thursday, 10-12 c.t., Building E1.3, Lecture Hall 002

First lecture: Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Tutorials: 2 hours each week; see below.

Type of Lectures – Prerequisites – Tutorials – Registration – Written Exam – Contents – Material for the Programming Assignments – Literature

Type of Lectures

Broad introduction to mathematically well-founded areas of image processing and computer vision. These fields are important in numerous applications including medical image analysis, computer-aided quality control, robotics, computer graphics, multimedia and artificial intelligence. The classes qualify for starting a bachelor's thesis in our group.

Prerequisites

This course is suitable for students of visual computing, mathematics, computer science, bioinformatics, computer and communications technology, and physics. It counts e.g. as a visual computing core course within the visual computing programme, an applied mathematics course within mathematics, or a core course (Stammvorlesung) in computer science.

It is based on mathematical knowledge from the first two semesters. For the programming assignments, some elementary knowledge of C is required. The lectures are given in English.

Tutorials

The tutorials include homework assignments (theory and programming) as well as classroom assignments. The programming assignments give an intuition about the way how image processing and computer vision algorithms work, while the theoretical assigments provide additional mathematical insights. Classroom assignments are supposed to be easier and should guide you gently to the main themes.

For the homework assignments you can obtain up to 24 points per week. Actively participating in the classroom assignments gives you 12 more points per week, regardless of the correctness of your solutions. To qualify for both exams you need 2/3 of all possible points. For 13 weeks, this comes down to 13 x 24 = 312 points. Working in groups of up to 3 people is permitted, but all persons must be in the same tutorial group.

If you have questions concerning the tutorials, please do not hesitate to contact Pascal Peter.

Seven groups are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon:

Group T1:
Tue, 14-16, Building E1.3, Seminar Room 016
(English only)

Group T2:
Tue, 14-16, Building E1.1, Room U12

Group T3:
Tue, 16-18, Building E1.3, Seminar Room 016

Group W1:
Wed, 12-14, Building E1.3, Seminar Room 015
(English only)

Group W2:
Wed, 12-14, Building E1.3, Seminar Room 016
(in German)

Group W3:
Wed, 14-16, Building E1.3, Seminar Room 015
(English only)

Group W4:
Wed, 14-16, Building E1.3, Seminar Room 016
(also for honour's programme)

Remarks: All groups except W2 are conducted in English. Groups marked with "English only" also only accept exercise submissions in English. The group W4 is not exclusively for students from the honour's programme, all students are welcome.

If you have difficulties with the programming assignments, feel free to participate in

Optional Guided Programming (OGP):
Tue, 18-20, CIP 012 in Building E1.3
Tutor: Pascal Peter

The tutors can be reached via the mail addresses:
ipcv-# -- at -- mia.uni-saarland.de
where # has to be replaced by t1, t2, t3, w1, w2, w3, and w4, respectively.

Registration

Registration: Between Tue, Oct. 15, 2013, 15:00 and Fri, Oct. 18, 2013, 15:00, you could register for this course. Registration is now closed.

Please register also in the HISPOS system. Please note that the HISPOS registration is completely independent of the lecture registration and is not administered by us. According to the examination office, you have to register for the exam until Nov. 17th. You can withdraw your registration until two weeks before the first exam. If you are a junior or Erasmus student, you do not have to register via HISPOS.

Written Exams

The first written exam takes place on
Wednesday, February 12, 2014 from 14:00 to 17:00,
in Building E2.2, Günter Hotz Lecture Theatre, and Building E1.3, Lecture Halls 001-003.

The second written exam takes place on
Monday, April 7, 2014 from 14:00 to 17:00,
in Building E2.2, Günter Hotz Lecture Theatre, and Building E1.3, Lecture Halls 001-003.

In order to qualify for the exams you need a total amount of 2/3 of all possible points from the homework and classroom assignments. In case of qualification, you are allowed to take part in both exams. The better grade counts.

The results of the first written exam can be found here, and the corresponding distribution of points and grades here.

The results of the second written exam can be found here, and the corresponding distribution of points and grades here.

Each student who has participated in the second written exam has the opportunity to inspect his/her graded solutions in room 4.10 in Bldg. E1.7 on Thursday, April 17th, 2014, from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

The exact time slot depends on your last (family) name:
A - K : 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
L - Z : 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Contents

Course material is available on this webpage in order to support the classroom teaching and the tutorials, not to replace them. Additional organisational information, examples and explanations that may be relevant for your understanding and the exam are provided in the lectures and tutorials. It is solely your responsibility - not ours - to make sure that you receive this infomation.

PART I: FOUNDATIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

Date Topic
15.10. Foundations I: Definitions, Image Types, Discretisation

17.10. Foundations II: Degradations in Digital Images
(contains classroom assignment C1 and homework H1)

22.10. Foundations III: Colour Perception and Colour Spaces

24.10. Image Transformations I: Continuous Fourier Transform
(contains classroom assignment C2 and homework H2)

29.10. Image Transformations II: Sampling Theorem and Discrete Fourier Transform

31.10. Image Transformations III: Discrete Cosine Transform and Image Pyramids
(contains classroom assignment C3 and homework H3)

05.11. Image Transformations IV: Discrete Wavelet Transform

07.11. Image Compression
(contains classroom assignment C4 and homework H4)

12.11. Image Interpolation

PART II: IMAGE PROCESSING

Date Topic

14.11. Point Operations
(contains classroom assignment C5 and homework H5)

19.11. Linear Filters I: System Theory

21.11. Linear Filters II: Derivative Filters
(contains classroom assignment C6 and homework H6)

26.11. Linear Filters III: Detection of Edges and Corners

28.11. Nonlinear Filters I: Morphology and Median Filters
(contains classroom assignment C7 and homework H7)

03.12. Nonlinear Filters II: Wavelet Shrinkage, Bilateral Filters, NL-Means

05.12. Nonlinear Filters III: Nonlinear Diffusion Filtering
(contains classroom assignment C8 and homework H8)

10.12. Global Filters I: Discrete Variational Methods

12.12. Global Filters II: Continuous Variational Methods
(contains classroom assignment C9 and homework H9)

17.12. Global Filters III: Deconvolution Methods

19.12. Texture Analysis
(contains classroom assignment C10 and homework H10)

PART III: COMPUTER VISION AND IMAGE UNDERSTANDING

Date Topic

07.01. Segmentation I: Thresholding, Region Growing, Region Merging

09.01. Segmentation II: Watersheds and Optimisation Methods
(contains classroom assignment C11 and homework H11)

14.01. Image Sequence Analysis I: Local Methods

16.01. Image Sequence Analysis II: Variational Methods
(contains classroom assignment C12 and homework H12)

21.01. 3-D Reconstruction I: Camera Geometry

23.01. 3-D Reconstruction II: Stereo
(contains classroom assignment C13 and homework H13)

28.01. 3-D Reconstruction III: Shape-from-Shading

30.01. Object Recognition I: Hough Transform and Invariants

04.02. Object Recognition II: Eigenspace Methods

06.02. Summary, Conclusions, Outlook

Material for the Programming Assigments

Here you can download material for the programming assignments.

Date Topic

17. 10. Assignment H1: Noise, Quantisation and Dithering

24. 10. Assignment H2: Colour Spaces and Subsampling

31. 10. Assignment H3: Fourier Analysis and Fourier Filtering

07. 11. Assignment H4: Discrete Cosine Transform

14. 11. Assignment H5: Point Transformations

21. 11. Assignment H6: Linear Filters

28. 11. Assignment H7: Edge and Corner Detection, Morphology

05. 12. Assignment H8: Wavelet Shrinkage, NL-Means

12. 12. Assignment H9: Whittaker-Tikhonov Regularisation, Unsharp Masking

19. 12. Assignment H10: Texture Inpainting, Deconvolution

09. 01. Assignment H11: Toboggan Watershed Segmentation

16. 01. Assignment H12: Optic Flow

23. 01. Assignment H13: Correlation-Based Stereo Method

Literature

There is no specific text book for this class, but many of our image processing topics are covered in one of the following books:

J. Bigun: Vision with Direction. Springer, Berlin, 2006.

R. C. Gonzalez, R. E. Woods: Digital Image Processing. Addison-Wesley, Third Edition, 2008.

K. D. Tönnies: Grundlagen der Bildverarbeitung. Pearson Studium, München, 2005.

Computer vision books include

E. Trucco, A. Verri: Introductory Techniques for 3-D Computer Vision. Prentice Hill, Upper Saddle River, 1998.

R. Klette, K. Schlüns, A. Koschan: Computer Vision: Three-Dimensional Data from Images. Springer, Singapore, 1998.

R. Szeliski: Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications. Springer, New York, 2010.

These and further books can be found in the mathematics and computer science library.
Furthermore, there is an interesting online compendium, where many researchers have written survey articles.
General information and numerous links can be found at the Computer Vision Homepage. If you are looking for a specific reference, check out Keith Price's Annotated Computer Vision Bibliography. Many online articles and citations can be extracted from the CiteSeer webpage.