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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING
Image Reconstruction and Multidimensional Field
Estimation From Randomly Scattered Sensors
Pan Pan, Student Member, IEEE, and Dan Schonfeld, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Many important problems in statistical signal pro-
cessing can be formulated as function estimation from randomly
scattered sensors in a multidimensional space, e.g., image recon-
struction from photon-limited images and field estimation from
scattered sensors. We present a novel approach to the study of
signal reconstruction from random samples in a multidimensional
space. In particular, we study a classical iterative reconstruction
method and demonstrate that it forms a sequence of unbiased
estimates for band-limited signals, which converge to the true
function in the mean-square sense. We subsequently rely on the
iterative estimation method for multidimensional image recon-
struction and field estimation from sensors scattered according to
a multidimensional Poisson and uniform distribution. Computer
simulation experiments are used to demonstrate the efficiency of
the iterative estimation method in image reconstruction and field
estimation from randomly scattered sensors.
Index Terms—Field estimation, image reconstruction, random
sampling, sensor networks.
I. INTRODUCTION
classical problem in image processing is the task of image
A reconstruction from limited samples. Such images are ac-
quired in applications that rely on a limited number of sensors,
e.g., photon-limited images [1] and emission tomography [2].
This problem has been modeled as function estimation from ir-
regular samples. Several iterative reconstruction schemes have
been proposed for function estimation from irregular samples
[3]–[5].
Image analysis from limited sensors is a specific problem
within the broad discipline of sensor networks. Tremendous in-
terest in sensor networks has been gained over the past decade.
One of the key problems in this area is the task of field esti-
mation from scattered sensors. For example, using temperature
sensors scattered over a geographic region, we would like to es-
timate the temperature at any location in the vicinity. Similar
problems have arisen in battlefield surveillance, environmental
monitoring, biological detection, industrial diagnostics, etc. [6].
These applications require a number of sensors scattered over a
contiguous region to collect critical information such as temper-
ature, pressure, humidity, etc. Clearly, the monitored area should
be well covered by a sufficient number of sensors. This is known
as the coverage problem in sensor networks [7]. However, the
number of sensors available is limited, and, thus, one must rely
Manuscript received May 4, 2007; revised October 20, 2007. The associate
editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publica-
tion was Prof. Stanley J. Reeves.
The authors are with the Multimedia Communications Laboratory, Depart-
ment of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago,
Chicago, IL 60607-7053 USA (e-mail: ppan3@uic.edu; dans@uic.edutfuzz).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIP.2007.912579
1057-7149/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
1
on discrete sensors for field estimation of a mutlidimensional
continuous space.
Sensor field estimation is an important problem in sensor net-
works. Most existing methods in the sensor networks commu-
nity have relied on function interpolation techniques. For ex-
ample, it is common to use a mixture of Gaussian interpola-
tion, where a Gaussian function is placed at the sensor locations
whose amplitude and variance is proportional to the sensed data
value. A more sophisticated approach to using Gaussian mix-
tures has been provided by the use of the expectation-maximiza-
tion algorithm to determine the maximum-likelihood estimate
of the location, amplitude and variance [8].
We formulate the field estimation problem as signal recon-
struction from scattered sensors. This approach is an extension
of the problem of image reconstruction from limited samples.
The solution to these problems is based on classical methods for
function estimation from irregular samples. The methods used
for signal reconstruction from irregular samples have been in-
vestigated over the past couple of decades [3]–[5], [9]–[12].
A unified format of the classical iterative reconstruction
methods from missing samples is
[11], where is the original band-limited signal, is the
reconstruction signal at the th iteration, and denotes a com-
position of distortion and constraint operators. For instance,
the well-known Papoulis–Gerchberg extrapolation algorithm
[3], [4] is an example of this iterative reconstruction which
has been used extensively for estimation of missing data in
band-limited signals. Sauer and Allebach [5] presented sev-
eral important algorithms that form variations of the classical
iterative reconstruction scheme for estimation of band-limited
images. Early and Long [1] proved that the ART algorithm
[2] is functionally equivalent to the iterative reconstruction
algorithm and used it for remote sensing image reconstruction
and resolution enhancement.
The important issue of convergence of the iterative recon-
struction has also discussed. Youla and Webb [9] and Sauer and
Allebach [5] used the concept of projection onto convex sets
(POCS) and showed that the iterative reconstruction method
converges weakly to a final state which adheres to certain de-
sired properties. Marvasti et al. [10] and Gröhenig [11] proved
convergence of the iterative reconstruction to the true func-
tion. A detailed study of the upper and lower error bounds, op-
timum relaxation constant and rate of convergence has been pre-
sented by Ferreira [12].
Some limited analysis of the statistical properties of random
sampling has also been developed. However, much of the statis-
tical analysis of random sampling schemes has been limited thus
far to a 1-D processes. For example, Papoulis [13] proved that
Poisson samples of a 1-D function form an unbiased estimate of
the function in the spectrum domain. Marvasti used power spec-
tral analysis to explore the mean-square convergence of uniform
and Poisson sampling of a 1-D function in [14].
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the study When the samples are uniformly distributed or distributed ac-
of signal reconstruction from random samples in a mutlidi- cording to a homogenous Poisson process with infinite number
mensional space. We will investigate the statistical properties of samples, we can find the value of in terms of the spatial den-
of random sampling using mutlidimensional constant-mean sity of the random samples. Therefore, a special case of Propo-
point processes in Section II. We will subsequently show that sition 1 is given as follows.
a special case of the classical iterative reconstruction scheme Corollary 2: If the samples are identically and indepen-
forms a sequence of unbiased estimates of band-limited sig- dently (i.i.d.) uniformly distributed or distributed according to
nals, which converges to the true function in the mean-square a homogeneous Poisson process with infinite number of sam-
sense in Section III. In Section IV, we rely on the iterative ples, is an unbiased estimate of , where is
estimation method for mutlidimensional image reconstruction the spatial density of the samples for the uniform distribution
and field estimation from randomly scattered sensors. Finally, and the rate parameter for the Poisson process. Moreover, if
in Section V, we present a brief summary and discussion of our , then as .
results. Proof: Franks [15] proved the expression for and
for infinite 1-D pulse train , which are uniformly
II. MULTIDIMENSIONAL RANDOM SAMPLING distributed and distributed according to a homogeneous Poisson
First of all, we establish notation which we follow for the process.
remainder of the paper. An -dimensional signal is sam- After we extend the results of Franks to -dimensional case,
pled by a sampling process , where we obtain the following: when finite or infinite samples
; are the samples; is the are i.i.d. uniformly distributed with spatial density , or when
number of samples. is the Fourier transform of , infinite samples , i.e., , are distributed according to
where . is a sampling operator a homogeneous Poisson process with rate parameter
defined as
(3)

else A derivation of (3) is presented in the Appendix. From (3), we

obtain . As shown in (14) in the Appendix, implies
and is a band-limited operator given by the average number of Poisson points per unit volume of space.
Therefore, the rate parameter of homogeneous Poisson process
else. also describes the spatial density of the samples.
In Proposition 1, the accuracy of the unbiased estimate is
This paper is carried out in the view that are random sam- characterized by the variance of . Notice that as
ples. Therefore, the sampling function is also random. The approaches infinity, we have an infinite number of samples for
expectation of the sampling function, , is used to de- both cases, and as we have shown in the Appendix, we have
note the spatial density of the random points. We will now as-
sume that the spatial density of the random points is constant and (4)
show that sampling using constant-mean point processes yields
an unbiased estimate. We now observe that
Proposition 1: If , then is an unbi-
ased estimate of , where is a constant.
Proof: We observe that can be written as

(5)
(1)
Since , we observe that and (5)
implies that the variance of the unbiased estimate reduces to
The expectation of is constant, i.e., . There-
zero as approaches infinity. Therefore,
fore, from (1), we observe that
as .
(2) Corollary 2 can be also stated in the spectrum domain. Pa-
poulis [13] gave a 1-D case of Corollary 2 expressed in the spec-
trum domain when are distributed according to a 1-D ho-
which shows that is an unbiased estimate of . mogeneous Poisson process.
Proposition 1 can also be expressed in the spectrum domain Equation (3) reveals the reason that we usually use random
as follows. uniform deployment and random Poisson deployment as models
Corollary 1: If , then for sensor deployment in the sensor coverage problem.
is an unbiased estimate of
, where is a constant. III. ITERATIVE RECONSTRUCTION
Proof:
In this section, we use Proposition 1 to study the classical
iterative reconstruction scheme presented in Section I. We
. show that a special case of the classical iterative reconstruction
From (2), . scheme forms a sequence of unbiased estimates of band-limited
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PAN AND SCHONFELD: IMAGE RECONSTRUCTION AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL FIELD ESTIMATION 3

signals, which converges to the true function in the mean-square This induction of (7) proves that each iteration of the recon-
sense. We begin with one definition and one proposition. struction method generates an unbiased estimate given
Definition 1: [16] A contraction mapping, or contraction, on , where .
a metric space is a function from to itself, with the Then, we prove that the variance of the unbiased estimation
property that there is some real number such that decays to zero. We define a new operator , where
. Therefore, .
for all Marvasti et al. proved that the operator is a con-
traction when for 1-D signals in Sections II and
In a normed space with norm , if an operator III-A in [10]. Similar results about the iteration of the operator
is a contraction, then . If is linear have been presented by Sauer and Allebach in [5].
and contraction, then . If the above condition is One can easily check that the contraction of operator
satisfied for , then the mapping is said to be nonex- can be extended to mutlidimensional, e.g., the 2-D case in [17].
pansive. According to Proposition 2, the operator is also a contrac-
Proposition 2: In a normed space, if the operator is a tion when , i.e., , where
contraction, then the operator is also a contrac- , . Therefore
tion.
Proof: Since the operator is a contraction,
, where . Therefore,
. This indicates the
operator is also a contraction.
We now establish that the iterative reconstruction forms a se-
quence of unbiased estimates, which converges to the true func-
tion in the mean-square sense.
Proposition 3: If is a constant , an -dimensional
band-limited signal can be reconstructed from its scat-
tered samples iteratively by Therefore,
, given and . , which implies that if ,
This iteration procedure generates a sequence of unbiased esti- the variance of iteration reaches zero as reaches infinity. We
mates which converge in the mean-square sense for . note that a sequence of unbiased estimates whose variance
Proof: We prove that in each iteration the estimation is un- decays to zero implies convergence in the mean-square sense
biased by induction. Given , Proposition 1 [18]. Therefore, we observe that converges to in
tells us , which is the unbiased estimate when the mean-square sense, when .
. In general, Proposition 3 can be applied to any sampling
By assuming , we obtain structure provided that is a constant-mean point process
and the initial conditions are satisfied. However, when the
samples are uniformly distributed or distributed according
to a homogeneous Poisson process with infinite number of
samples, we observe that , which is the spatial
(6) density of the samples. This observation allows us to estimate
(7) the density from the observation data and recover the signal
from its samples without prior knowledge of the mean
as shown in Corollary 2. The method used to estimate from
We can view (6) in two ways: If the sampling in each iteration
the observation data is presented in Section IV.
maintains the same samples as in , the randomness of the iter-
Corollary 3: If are i.i.d. uniformly distributed or dis-
ation is only attributed to the random sampling of . Therefore,
tributed according to a homogeneous Poisson process with infi-
we can change the order of expectation and sampling operator
nite number of samples, an -dimensional band-limited signal
can be reconstructed iteratively by
, given and
, where is the spatial density of the samples for the uniform
distribution and the rate parameter for the Poisson process. This
(8) iteration procedure generates a sequence of unbiased estimates
which converge in the mean-square sense for .
Proof: Similar to the proof of Proposition 3, by using
The other possibility is that the sampling in each iteration is
Proposition 2 we can easily show that each iteration is an unbi-
random, i.e., each iteration will determine a new collection of
ased estimate whose variance converges to zero as approaches
random samples. We note that the new sampling in the th
infinity.
iteration is uncorrelated with the reconstruction result of the th
iteration, i.e., . Therefore, by using Proposition 1, we have
IV. IMAGE RECONSTRUCTION AND FIELD ESTIMATION
We, therefore, apply the iterative reconstruction algorithm
presented in Section III to the application of image reconstruc-
tion and sensor field estimation over . We gen-
(9) erate Poisson points by the “dart-throwing” algorithm in [19].
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING
Fig. 1. Image Pepper. (a) Original image; (b) sampled image (Poisson sam-
pling with  = 0:278); (c) reconstructed image at the fifth iteration.
Fig. 2. Image House. (a) Original image; (b) sampled image (uniform sam-
pling with  = 0:5); (c) reconstructed image at the ninth iteration.
As discussed in Section II, for both uniform sampling and
Poisson sampling, describes the spatial density of samples,
which is equal to the average number of samples per unit volume
of space. Therefore, can be obtained by the sensed data as
follows.
1) Get many different volumes within the space,
. lidimensional space. We proved that random sampling using
2) Get their density by calculating the average points per
unit volume.
3) The of these points is estimated by . construction method forms a sequence of unbiased estimates for
Figs. 1 and 2 and Figs. 3 and 4 show the simulation results
of image reconstruction and field estimation from sensors
scattered according a Poisson and uniform distribution re-
spectively with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), where
and is the number of iterations. The SNR corre-
sponding to the sampled images or sensor data is obtained by
replacing the iterative reconstruction by the sampled
function in the SNR computation [see Figs. 1–4(b)].
In Figs. 3 and 4, the images are used to depict the value of the
signal provided by the sensor data. Most of the images and
sensed data can be considered essentially band limited, i.e.,
most of the energy confines within a certain bandwidth. In
Figs. 1–3, the original real images and signals are processed
by a Gaussian low-pass filter to maintain greater detail. The
band-limited operator in Corollary 3 is also changed to
Gaussian filter, as a good approximation of the ideal band-lim-
ited operator. Fig. 4(a) is represented by pure band-limited
data. Fig. 4(c) and (d) is the reconstruction results if we use
an ideal band-limited operator and a Gaussian filter in the iter-
ation, respectively. The use of an ideal band-limited operator
in the iterative reconstruction method results in many artifacts
as shown in Fig. 4(c). The use of a Gaussian filter, however,
improves the reconstruction substantially and removes many of
the artifacts as illustrated in Fig. 4(d).
It can be shown that the iterative estimation method performs
efficiently even when the sensors are sparse. According to
Fig. 3. Altitude over an area. (a) True altitude; (b) sensed data (Poisson sam-
pling with  = 0:278); (c) reconstructed signal at the eighth iteration.
Corollary 2, our results for i.i.d. uniformly distributed samples
are valid for an arbitrary number of samples as long as the
spatial density of the samples remains constant. However,
when the samples are distributed according to a homogeneous
Poisson process in the plane, the point process is constant mean
and corresponds to the density of the process in the limit as the
number of samples approaches infinity. In our simulation re-
sults, we rely on a finite number of Poisson distributed random
samples on a bounded region (e.g., square area). We interpret
these random samples as an extraction of a bounded region
from an unbounded plane with an infinite number of Poisson
samples. By virtue of the extraction of a bounded region from
the plane, we inherently preserve the sampling density of the
Poisson process.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented a novel approach to the study of
signal reconstruction from randomly scattered sensors in a mut-
constant-mean point processes yields an unbiased estimate of
the signal. Moreover, we proved that the classical iterative re-
band-limited signals, which converge to the true function in the
mean-square sense. We finally demonstrated the performance
of the iterative estimation method for 2-D image reconstruction
and field estimation from Poisson and uniformly distributed sen-
sors.
APPENDIX A
MEAN AND AUTOCORRELATION OF RANDOM
SAMPLING PROCESSES
A. Uniformly Distributed I.I.D. Random Samples
The samples are i.i.d. distributed with probability den-
sity function , where is uniform over the space
and . Therefore
else.
We let , where is the spatial density of the
samples. Then we obtain
(10)
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PAN AND SCHONFELD: IMAGE RECONSTRUCTION AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL FIELD ESTIMATION 5

Fig. 4. Temperature over an area. (a) True temperature; (b) sensed data (uniform sampling with  = 0:5); (c) reconstructed signal at the 15th iteration using an
ideal band-limited operator in the iteration; (d) reconstructed signal at the 15th iteration using a Gaussian operator in the iteration.

the random variable as well as the joint probability density

for pairs of points and .
(11) The probability density function of is related to the prob-
ability that the th point occurs in a small space at the arbitrary
point [15]; i.e., for a small positive space
Considering separately the terms with , and the
terms with , we find
(15)

Thus, we have

(16)

Similarly, assuming

(12) (17)

Therefore, we have
B. Random Samples Distributed According to a Homogeneous
Poisson Process
An -dimensional Poisson process , (18)
, as a counting process,
describes the number of points inside the volume [20]. Now we obtain
Assuming a homogeneous Poisson process, where the rate
parameter , the probability of points
falls into the space , which implies , satisfies a
Poisson distribution

(13)

The expectation of the Poisson process is

(19)

Again, considering separately the terms for which , ,

and , and from (11), we observe that

(14)

From (14), we can see implies the average number of Poisson

points per unit volume of space.
The samples are distributed according to a Poisson
process with rate parameter . To evaluate the mean and auto- (20)
correlation of , we need the probability density function of
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING
Note that
(21)
We also observe that
(22)
Similarly, we have
(23)
Therefore, from (20)–(23), we obtain
(24)
This completes the proof.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for
their helpful suggestions, which greatly improved the quality
of this paper, as well as J. Yang and N. Bouaynaya for their
comments.
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Pan Pan, (S’06) received the B.S. degree in electronic information engineering
from Beihang University (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics),
Beijing, China, in 2005. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the Depart-
ment of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago.
During the summer of 2007, he was a Research Intern with NTT Commu-
nication Science Laboratories, Kanagawa, Japan. His research interests are in
signal, image and video processing, computer vision, and machine learning.
Dan Schonfeld (M’90–SM’05) was born in Westchester, PA, in 1964. He re-
ceived the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the
University of California, Berkeley, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
and computer engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD,
in 1986, 1988, and 1990, respectively.
In 1990, he joined the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is cur-
rently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
He has authored over 120 technical papers in various journals and conferences.
His current research interests are in multidimensional signal processing, image
and video analysis, computer vision, and genomic signal processing.
Dr. Schonfeld was a coauthor of papers that won the Best Student Paper
Awards in Visual Communication and Image Processing 2006 and the IEEE
International Conference on Image Processing 2006 and 2007. He serves as
an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING (for
Image and Video Storage, Retrieval, and Analysis) as well as an Associate
Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO
TECHNOLOGY (for Video Analysis). He has served as an Associate Editor
of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING (for Multidimensional
Signal Processing and Multimedia Signal Processing), as well as of the IEEE
TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING (for Nonlinear Filtering).