No abstract uploaded!

Image segmentation is an important task in the domain of computer vision and medical imaging. In natural and medical images, intensity inhomogeneity, i.e. the varying image intensity, occurs often and it poses considerable challenges for image segmentation. In this paper, we propose an efficient variational method for segmenting images with intensity inhomogeneity. The method is inspired by previous works on two-stage segmentation and variational Retinex. Our method consists of two stages. In the first stage, we decouple the image into reflection and illumination parts by solving a convex energy minimization model with either total variation or tight-frame regularisation. In the second stage, we segment the original image by thresholding on the reflection part, and the inhomogeneous intensity is estimated by the smoothly varying illumination part. We adopt a primal dual algorithm to solve the convex model in the first stage, and the convergence is guaranteed. Numerical experiments clearly show that our method is robust and efficient to segment both natural and medical images.

We study semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin (SLDG) and Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) schemes for some front propagation problems in the presence of an obstacle term, modeled by a nonlinear Hamilton-Jacobi equation of the form $\min(u_t + c u_x, u - g(x))=0$, in one space dimension. New convergence results and error bounds are obtained for Lipschitz regular data. These ``low regularity" assumptions are the natural ones for the solutions of the studied equations. Numerical tests are given to illustrate the behavior of our schemes.

Poisson equation on point cloud with Dirichlet boundary condition plays important role in many problems. In this paper, we use the volume constraint proposed by Du et.al to handle the Dirichlet boundary condition in the point integral method for Poisson equation on point cloud. We prove that the solution given by volume constraint converges to the true solution as the point cloud converges to the underlying smooth manifold.

Solutions for many problems of interest exhibit singular behaviors at domain corners or points where boundary condition changes type. For this type of problems, direct spectral methods with usual polynomial basis functions do not lead to a satisfactory convergence rate. We develop in this paper a M\"untz-Galerkin method which is based on specially tuned M\"untz polynomials to deal with the singular behaviors of the underlying problems. By exploring the relations between Jacobi polynomials and M\"untz polynomials, we develop efficient implementation procedures for the M\"untz-Galerkin method, and provide optimal error estimates. As examples of applications, we consider the Poisson equation with mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary conditions, whose solution behaves like $O(r^{1/2})$ near the singular point, and demonstrate that the M\"untz-Galerkin method greatly improves the rates of convergence of the usual spectral method.