Implicitly Weighted Methods in Robust Image Analysis

This paper is devoted to highly robust statistical methods with applications to image analysis. The methods of the paper exploit the idea of implicit weighting, which is inspired by the highly robust least weighted squares regression estimator. We use a correlation coefficient based on implicit weighting of individual pixels as a highly robust similarity measure between two images. The reweighted least weighted squares estimator is considered as an alternative regression estimator with a clear interpretation. We apply implicit weighting to dimension reduction by means of robust principal component analysis. Highly robust methods are exploited in tasks of face localization and face detection in a database of 2D images. In this context we investigate a method for outlier detection and a filter for image denoising based on implicit weighting.