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

Hyperspectral Image Restoration via Total Variation Regularized Low-rank Tensor Decomposition

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are often corrupted by a mixture of several types of noise during the acquisition process, e.g., Gaussian noise, impulse noise, dead lines, stripes, and many others. Such complex noise could degrade the quality of the acquired HSIs, limiting the precision of the subsequent processing. In this paper, we present a novel tensor-based HSI restoration approach by fully identifying the intrinsic structures of the clean HSI part and the mixed noise part respectively. Specifically, for the clean HSI part, we use tensor Tucker decomposition to describe the global correlation among all bands, and an anisotropic spatial-spectral total variation (SSTV) regularization to characterize the piecewise smooth structure in both spatial and spectral domains. For the mixed noise part, we adopt the $\ell_1$ norm regularization to detect the sparse noise, including stripes, impulse noise, and dead pixels. Despite that TV regulariztion has the ability of removing Gaussian noise, the Frobenius norm term is further used to model heavy Gaussian noise for some real-world scenarios. Then, we develop an efficient algorithm for solving the resulting optimization problem by using the augmented Lagrange multiplier (ALM) method. Finally, extensive experiments on simulated and real-world noise HSIs are carried out to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the existing state-of-the-art ones.Comment: 15 pages, 20 figure

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 for Remote Sensing: Overview and Toolbox

Remote sensing provides valuable information about objects or areas from a distance in either active (e.g., RADAR and LiDAR) or passive (e.g., multispectral and hyperspectral) modes. The quality of data acquired by remotely sensed imaging sensors (both active and passive) is often degraded by a variety of noise types and artifacts. Image restoration, which is a vibrant field of research in the remote sensing community, is the task of recovering the true unknown image from the degraded observed image. Each imaging sensor induces unique noise types and artifacts into the observed image. This fact has led to the expansion of restoration techniques in different paths according to each sensor type. This review paper brings together the advances of image restoration techniques with particular focuses on synthetic aperture radar and hyperspectral images as the most active sub-fields of image restoration in the remote sensing community. We, therefore, provide a comprehensive, discipline-specific starting point for researchers at different levels (i.e., students, researchers, and senior researchers) willing to investigate the vibrant topic of data restoration by supplying sufficient detail and references. Additionally, this review paper accompanies a toolbox to provide a platform to encourage interested students and researchers in the field to further explore the restoration techniques and fast-forward the community. The toolboxes are provided in https://github.com/ImageRestorationToolbox.Comment: This paper is under review in GRS

An overview of the fundamental approaches that yield several image denoising techniques

Digital image is considered as a powerful tool to carry and transmit information between people. Thus, it attracts the attention of large number of researchers, among them those interested in preserving the image features from any factors that may reduce the image quality. One of these factors is the noise which affects the visual aspect of the image and makes others image processing more difficult. Thus far, solving this noise problem remains a challenge for the researchers in this field. A lot of image denoising techniques have been introduced in order to remove the noise by taking care of the image features; in other words, getting the best similarity to the original image from the noisy one. However, the findings are still inconclusive. Beside the enormous amount of researches and studies which adopt several mathematical concepts (statistics, probabilities, modeling, PDEs, wavelet, fuzzy logic, etc.), there is also the scarcity of review papers which carry an important role in the development and progress of research. Thus, this review paper intorduce an overview of the different fundamental approaches that yield the several image-denoising techniques, presented with a new classification. Furthermore, the paper presents the different evaluation tools needed on the comparison between these techniques in order to facilitate the processing of this noise problem, among a great diversity of techniques and concepts

Machine Learning And Image Processing For Noise Removal And Robust Edge Detection In The Presence Of Mixed Noise

The central goal of this dissertation is to design and model a smoothing filter based on the random single and mixed noise distribution that would attenuate the effect of noise while preserving edge details. Only then could robust, integrated and resilient edge detection methods be deployed to overcome the ubiquitous presence of random noise in images. Random noise effects are modeled as those that could emanate from impulse noise, Gaussian noise and speckle noise. In the first step, evaluation of methods is performed based on an exhaustive review on the different types of denoising methods which focus on impulse noise, Gaussian noise and their related denoising filters. These include spatial filters (linear, non-linear and a combination of them), transform domain filters, neural network-based filters, numerical-based filters, fuzzy based filters, morphological filters, statistical filters, and supervised learning-based filters. In the second step, switching adaptive median and fixed weighted mean filter (SAMFWMF) which is a combination of linear and non-linear filters, is introduced in order to detect and remove impulse noise. Then, a robust edge detection method is applied which relies on an integrated process including non-maximum suppression, maximum sequence, thresholding and morphological operations. The results are obtained on MRI and natural images. In the third step, a combination of transform domain-based filter which is a combination of dual tree – complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) and total variation, is introduced in order to detect and remove Gaussian noise as well as mixed Gaussian and Speckle noise. Then, a robust edge detection is applied in order to track the true edges. The results are obtained on medical ultrasound and natural images. In the fourth step, a smoothing filter, which is a feed-forward convolutional network (CNN) is introduced to assume a deep architecture, and supported through a specific learning algorithm, l2 loss function minimization, a regularization method, and batch normalization all integrated in order to detect and remove impulse noise as well as mixed impulse and Gaussian noise. Then, a robust edge detection is applied in order to track the true edges. The results are obtained on natural images for both specific and non-specific noise-level

Adaptive Edge-guided Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) Image Denoising Algorithm

Image denoising is a well studied field, yet reducing noise from images is still a valid challenge. Recently proposed Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) is the current state of the art algorithm for denoising images corrupted by Additive White Gaussian noise (AWGN). Though BM3D outperforms all existing methods for AWGN denoising, still its performance decreases as the noise level increases in images, since it is harder to find proper match for reference blocks in the presence of highly corrupted pixel values. It also blurs sharp edges and textures. To overcome these problems we proposed an edge guided BM3D with selective pixel restoration. For higher noise levels it is possible to detect noisy pixels form its neighborhoods gray level statistics. We exploited this property to reduce noise as much as possible by applying a pre-filter. We also introduced an edge guided pixel restoration process in the hard-thresholding step of BM3D to restore the sharpness of edges and textures. Experimental results confirm that our proposed method is competitive and outperforms the state of the art BM3D in all considered subjective and objective quality measurements, particularly in preserving edges, textures and image contrast