3 research outputs found
RCRN: Real-world Character Image Restoration Network via Skeleton Extraction
Constructing high-quality character image datasets is challenging because
real-world images are often affected by image degradation. There are
limitations when applying current image restoration methods to such real-world
character images, since (i) the categories of noise in character images are
different from those in general images; (ii) real-world character images
usually contain more complex image degradation, e.g., mixed noise at different
noise levels. To address these problems, we propose a real-world character
restoration network (RCRN) to effectively restore degraded character images,
where character skeleton information and scale-ensemble feature extraction are
utilized to obtain better restoration performance. The proposed method consists
of a skeleton extractor (SENet) and a character image restorer (CiRNet). SENet
aims to preserve the structural consistency of the character and normalize
complex noise. Then, CiRNet reconstructs clean images from degraded character
images and their skeletons. Due to the lack of benchmarks for real-world
character image restoration, we constructed a dataset containing 1,606
character images with real-world degradation to evaluate the validity of the
proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that RCRN outperforms
state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: Accepted to ACM MM 202
CharFormer: A Glyph Fusion based Attentive Framework for High-precision Character Image Denoising
Degraded images commonly exist in the general sources of character images,
leading to unsatisfactory character recognition results. Existing methods have
dedicated efforts to restoring degraded character images. However, the
denoising results obtained by these methods do not appear to improve character
recognition performance. This is mainly because current methods only focus on
pixel-level information and ignore critical features of a character, such as
its glyph, resulting in character-glyph damage during the denoising process. In
this paper, we introduce a novel generic framework based on glyph fusion and
attention mechanisms, i.e., CharFormer, for precisely recovering character
images without changing their inherent glyphs. Unlike existing frameworks,
CharFormer introduces a parallel target task for capturing additional
information and injecting it into the image denoising backbone, which will
maintain the consistency of character glyphs during character image denoising.
Moreover, we utilize attention-based networks for global-local feature
interaction, which will help to deal with blind denoising and enhance denoising
performance. We compare CharFormer with state-of-the-art methods on multiple
datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of CharFormer
quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 202
Patch-based Denoising Algorithms for Single and Multi-view Images
In general, all single and multi-view digital images are captured using sensors, where they are often contaminated with noise, which is an undesired random signal. Such noise can also be produced during transmission or by lossy image compression. Reducing the noise and enhancing those images is among the fundamental digital image processing tasks. Improving the performance of image denoising methods, would greatly contribute to single or multi-view image processing techniques, e.g. segmentation, computing disparity maps, etc. Patch-based denoising methods have recently emerged as the state-of-the-art denoising approaches for various additive noise levels. This thesis proposes two patch-based denoising methods for single and multi-view images, respectively.
A modification to the block matching 3D algorithm is proposed for single image denoising. An adaptive collaborative thresholding filter is proposed which consists of a classification map and a set of various thresholding levels and operators. These are exploited when the collaborative hard-thresholding step is applied. Moreover, the collaborative Wiener filtering is improved by assigning greater weight when dealing with similar patches.
For the denoising of multi-view images, this thesis proposes algorithms that takes a pair of noisy images captured from two different directions at the same time (stereoscopic images). The structural, maximum difference or the singular value decomposition-based similarity metrics is utilized for identifying locations of similar search windows in the input images. The non-local means algorithm is adapted for filtering these noisy multi-view images.
The performance of both methods have been evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively through a number of experiments using the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the mean structural similarity measure. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm for single image denoising outperforms the original block matching 3D algorithm at various noise levels. Moreover, the proposed algorithm for multi-view image denoising can effectively reduce noise and assist to estimate more accurate disparity maps at various noise levels