Quantum median filter for Total Variation image denoising

In this new computing paradigm, named quantum computing, researchers from all over the world are taking their first steps in designing quantum circuits for image processing, through a difficult process of knowledge transfer. This effort is named Quantum Image Processing, an emerging research field pushed by powerful parallel computing capabilities of quantum computers. This work goes in this direction and proposes the challenging development of a powerful method of image denoising, such as the Total Variation (TV) model, in a quantum environment. The proposed Quantum TV is described and its sub-components are analysed. Despite the natural limitations of the current capabilities of quantum devices, the experimental results show a competitive denoising performance compared to the classical variational TV counterpart.

A fast nonconvex Compressed Sensing algorithm for highly low-sampled MR images reconstruction

In this paper we present a fast and efficient method for the reconstruction of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) from severely under-sampled data. From the Compressed Sensing theory we have mathematically modeled the problem as a constrained minimization problem with a family of non-convex regularizing objective functions depending on a parameter and a least squares data fit constraint. We propose a fast and efficient algorithm, named Fast NonConvex Reweighting (FNCR) algorithm, based on an iterative scheme where the non-convex problem is approximated by its convex linearization and the penalization parameter is automatically updated. The convex problem is solved by a Forward-Backward procedure, where the Backward step is performed by a Split Bregman strategy. Moreover, we propose a new efficient iterative solver for the arising linear systems. We prove the convergence of the proposed FNCR method. The results on synthetic phantoms and real images show that the algorithm is very well performing and computationally efficient, even when compared to the best performing methods proposed in the literature.