IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 18, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2009 435
VI. CONCLUSION
In this correspondence, we propose a high-fidelity image water-
marking for annotation with robustness to moderate distortion. To
achieve the high fidelity of the embedded image, a visual perception
model is introduced to quantify the localized tolerance to noise for
arbitrary imagery. The model is built by mixing the outputs from an
entropy filter and a differential localized standard deviation filter. We
then employ the proposed visual model to embed 32 bits of metadata
into a single image in a way that is robust to JPEG compression and
cropping while maintaining high fidelity. The results on a database of
highly challenging photographic images and medical images show the
effectiveness of the proposed annotation technology. It can achieve
high fidelity for natural images with PSNR around 50 dB with ro-
bustness to moderate JPEG compression, and meet the requirements
of “near-lossless” and “almost-lossless” for medical images with
robustness to moderate JPEG compression.
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medical/samples
Necessary and Sufficient Convergence Conditions for
Algebraic Image Reconstruction Algorithms
Gangrong Qu, Caifang Wang, and Ming Jiang, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—The Landweber scheme is an algebraic reconstruction method
and includes several important algorithms as its special cases. The conver-
gence of the Landweber scheme is of both theoretical and practical impor-
tance. Using the singular value decomposition (SVD), we derive an itera-
tive representation formula for the Landweber scheme and consequently
establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for its convergence. In ad-
dition to verifying the necessity and sufficiency of known convergent condi-
tions, we find new convergence conditions allowing relaxation coefficients
in an interval not covered by known results. Moreover, it is found that the
Landweber scheme can converge within finite iterations when the relax-
ation coefficients are chosen to be the inverses of squares of the nonzero
singular values. Furthermore, the limits of the Landweber scheme in all
convergence cases are shown to be the sum of the minimum norm solution
of a weighted least-squares problem and an oblique projection of the initial
image onto the null space of the system matrix.
Index Terms—Image reconstruction, singular value decomposition
(SVD), the Landweber scheme, weighted least-squares.
I. I
NTRODUCTION
Many imaging systems can be modeled by the following linear
system of equations
Ax
=
b
(1)
where the observed data is
b
=(
b
1
111
b
M
)
T
2
K
M
and the image
is
x
=(
x
1
111
x
N
)
T
2
K
N
. The number field
K
can be the reals
R
or the complexes
C
. The system matrix
A
=(
A
i;j
)
is nonzero and
of the dimension
M
2
N
matrix. The image reconstruction problem
is to reconstruct the original image
x
from the observed data
b
. The
Landweber scheme is an algebraic reconstruction method. For the
linear system (1), it can be written as [1]–[3]
x
(
n
+1)
=
x
(
n
)
+
n
V
0
1
A
3
W b
0
Ax
(
n
)
(2)
for
n
=0
;
1
;
111
, where
n
is the relaxation coefficient,
x
(0)
is an
initial guess,
A
3
is the conjugate transpose of
A
,
V
and
W
are two
positive definite matrices of orders
N
and
M
, respectively, which are
symmetric when
K
=
R
or Hermitian when
K
=
C
. The Landweber
scheme is a method to find one least-squares solution of (1) among
others, especially for inconsistent linear systems in image reconstruc-
tion. The following least-squares functional
L
(
x
)=
1
2
k
b
0
Ax
k
2
W
;
8
x
2
K
N
(3)
Manuscript received February 15, 2007; revised September 15, 2008. First
published December 12, 2008; current version published January 09, 2009. G.
Qu was supported by NSFC (60772041). C. Wang and M. Jiang were supported
in part by Chinese NKBRSF (2003CB716101), in part by NSFC (60325101,
60532080, 60628102, 60872078), in part by the Ministry of Education
(306017), in part by the Engineering Research Institute of Peking University,
and in part by Microsoft Research Asia. The associate editor coordinating the
review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Peter C.
Doerschuk.
G. Qu is with the School of Science, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing
100044, China (e-mail: grqu@bjtu.edu.cn).
C. Wang and M. Jiang are with the LMAM, School of Mathematical Sciences,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China (e-mail: wangcfg@pku.edu.cn; ming-
jiang@ieee.org).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIP.2008.2008076
1057-7149/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE