Convolutional Deblurring for Natural Imaging

In this paper, we propose a novel design of image deblurring in the form of one-shot convolution filtering that can directly convolve with naturally blurred images for restoration. The problem of optical blurring is a common disadvantage to many imaging applications that suffer from optical imperfections. Despite numerous deconvolution methods that blindly estimate blurring in either inclusive or exclusive forms, they are practically challenging due to high computational cost and low image reconstruction quality. Both conditions of high accuracy and high speed are prerequisites for high-throughput imaging platforms in digital archiving. In such platforms, deblurring is required after image acquisition before being stored, previewed, or processed for high-level interpretation. Therefore, on-the-fly correction of such images is important to avoid possible time delays, mitigate computational expenses, and increase image perception quality. We bridge this gap by synthesizing a deconvolution kernel as a linear combination of Finite Impulse Response (FIR) even-derivative filters that can be directly convolved with blurry input images to boost the frequency fall-off of the Point Spread Function (PSF) associated with the optical blur. We employ a Gaussian low-pass filter to decouple the image denoising problem for image edge deblurring. Furthermore, we propose a blind approach to estimate the PSF statistics for two Gaussian and Laplacian models that are common in many imaging pipelines. Thorough experiments are designed to test and validate the efficiency of the proposed method using 2054 naturally blurred images across six imaging applications and seven state-of-the-art deconvolution methods.Comment: 15 pages, for publication in IEEE Transaction Image Processin

Recent Progress in Image Deblurring

This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image deblurring, including non-blind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, image deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods, homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also presented.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figure

Image Restoration Using Joint Statistical Modeling in Space-Transform Domain

This paper presents a novel strategy for high-fidelity image restoration by characterizing both local smoothness and nonlocal self-similarity of natural images in a unified statistical manner. The main contributions are three-folds. First, from the perspective of image statistics, a joint statistical modeling (JSM) in an adaptive hybrid space-transform domain is established, which offers a powerful mechanism of combining local smoothness and nonlocal self-similarity simultaneously to ensure a more reliable and robust estimation. Second, a new form of minimization functional for solving image inverse problem is formulated using JSM under regularization-based framework. Finally, in order to make JSM tractable and robust, a new Split-Bregman based algorithm is developed to efficiently solve the above severely underdetermined inverse problem associated with theoretical proof of convergence. Extensive experiments on image inpainting, image deblurring and mixed Gaussian plus salt-and-pepper noise removal applications verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Comment: 14 pages, 18 figures, 7 Tables, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits System and Video Technology (TCSVT). High resolution pdf version and Code can be found at: http://idm.pku.edu.cn/staff/zhangjian/IRJSM

Regularized adaptive long autoregressive spectral analysis

This paper is devoted to adaptive long autoregressive spectral analysis when (i) very few data are available, (ii) information does exist beforehand concerning the spectral smoothness and time continuity of the analyzed signals. The contribution is founded on two papers by Kitagawa and Gersch. The first one deals with spectral smoothness, in the regularization framework, while the second one is devoted to time continuity, in the Kalman formalism. The present paper proposes an original synthesis of the two contributions: a new regularized criterion is introduced that takes both information into account. The criterion is efficiently optimized by a Kalman smoother. One of the major features of the method is that it is entirely unsupervised: the problem of automatically adjusting the hyperparameters that balance data-based versus prior-based information is solved by maximum likelihood. The improvement is quantified in the field of meteorological radar

A Non-Local Structure Tensor Based Approach for Multicomponent Image Recovery Problems

Non-Local Total Variation (NLTV) has emerged as a useful tool in variational methods for image recovery problems. In this paper, we extend the NLTV-based regularization to multicomponent images by taking advantage of the Structure Tensor (ST) resulting from the gradient of a multicomponent image. The proposed approach allows us to penalize the non-local variations, jointly for the different components, through various $\ell_{1,p}$ matrix norms with $p \ge 1$. To facilitate the choice of the hyper-parameters, we adopt a constrained convex optimization approach in which we minimize the data fidelity term subject to a constraint involving the ST-NLTV regularization. The resulting convex optimization problem is solved with a novel epigraphical projection method. This formulation can be efficiently implemented thanks to the flexibility offered by recent primal-dual proximal algorithms. Experiments are carried out for multispectral and hyperspectral images. The results demonstrate the interest of introducing a non-local structure tensor regularization and show that the proposed approach leads to significant improvements in terms of convergence speed over current state-of-the-art methods