295 research outputs found
Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration
Model-based optimization methods and discriminative learning methods have
been the two dominant strategies for solving various inverse problems in
low-level vision. Typically, those two kinds of methods have their respective
merits and drawbacks, e.g., model-based optimization methods are flexible for
handling different inverse problems but are usually time-consuming with
sophisticated priors for the purpose of good performance; in the meanwhile,
discriminative learning methods have fast testing speed but their application
range is greatly restricted by the specialized task. Recent works have revealed
that, with the aid of variable splitting techniques, denoiser prior can be
plugged in as a modular part of model-based optimization methods to solve other
inverse problems (e.g., deblurring). Such an integration induces considerable
advantage when the denoiser is obtained via discriminative learning. However,
the study of integration with fast discriminative denoiser prior is still
lacking. To this end, this paper aims to train a set of fast and effective CNN
(convolutional neural network) denoisers and integrate them into model-based
optimization method to solve other inverse problems. Experimental results
demonstrate that the learned set of denoisers not only achieve promising
Gaussian denoising results but also can be used as prior to deliver good
performance for various low-level vision applications.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2017. Code: https://github.com/cszn/ircn
Scene-adapted plug-and-play algorithm with convergence guarantees
Recent frameworks, such as the so-called plug-and-play, allow us to leverage
the developments in image denoising to tackle other, and more involved,
problems in image processing. As the name suggests, state-of-the-art denoisers
are plugged into an iterative algorithm that alternates between a denoising
step and the inversion of the observation operator. While these tools offer
flexibility, the convergence of the resulting algorithm may be difficult to
analyse. In this paper, we plug a state-of-the-art denoiser, based on a
Gaussian mixture model, in the iterations of an alternating direction method of
multipliers and prove the algorithm is guaranteed to converge. Moreover, we
build upon the concept of scene-adapted priors where we learn a model targeted
to a specific scene being imaged, and apply the proposed method to address the
hyperspectral sharpening problem
Data-Driven Image Restoration
Every day many images are taken by digital cameras, and people
are demanding visually accurate and pleasing result. Noise and
blur degrade images captured by modern cameras, and high-level
vision tasks (such as segmentation, recognition, and tracking)
require high-quality images. Therefore, image restoration
specifically, image
deblurring and image denoising is a critical preprocessing step.
A fundamental problem in image deblurring is to recover reliably
distinct spatial frequencies that have been suppressed by the
blur kernel. Existing image deblurring techniques often rely on
generic image priors that only help recover part of the frequency
spectrum, such as the frequencies near the high-end. To this end,
we pose the following specific questions: (i) Does class-specific
information offer an advantage over existing generic priors for
image quality restoration? (ii) If a class-specific prior exists,
how should it be encoded into a deblurring framework to recover
attenuated image frequencies? Throughout this work, we devise a
class-specific prior based on the band-pass filter responses and
incorporate it into a deblurring strategy. Specifically, we show
that the subspace of band-pass filtered images and their
intensity distributions serve as useful priors for recovering
image frequencies.
Next, we present a novel image denoising algorithm that uses
external, category specific image database. In contrast to
existing noisy image restoration algorithms, our method selects
clean image “support patches” similar to the noisy patch from
an external database. We employ a content adaptive distribution
model for each patch where we derive the parameters of the
distribution from the support patches. Our objective function
composed of a Gaussian fidelity term that imposes category
specific information, and a low-rank term that encourages the
similarity between the noisy and the support patches in a robust
manner.
Finally, we propose to learn a fully-convolutional network model
that consists of a Chain of Identity Mapping Modules (CIMM) for
image denoising. The CIMM structure possesses two distinctive
features that are important for the noise removal task. Firstly,
each residual unit employs identity mappings as the skip
connections and receives pre-activated input to preserve the
gradient magnitude propagated in both the forward and backward
directions. Secondly, by utilizing dilated kernels for the
convolution layers in the residual branch, each neuron in the
last convolution layer of each module can observe the full
receptive field of the first layer
Block Coordinate Plug-and-Play Methods for Blind Inverse Problems
Plug-and-play (PnP) prior is a well-known class of methods for solving
imaging inverse problems by computing fixed-points of operators combining
physical measurement models and learned image denoisers. While PnP methods have
been extensively used for image recovery with known measurement operators,
there is little work on PnP for solving blind inverse problems. We address this
gap by presenting a new block-coordinate PnP (BC-PnP) method that efficiently
solves this joint estimation problem by introducing learned denoisers as priors
on both the unknown image and the unknown measurement operator. We present a
new convergence theory for BC-PnP compatible with blind inverse problems by
considering nonconvex data-fidelity terms and expansive denoisers. Our theory
analyzes the convergence of BC-PnP to a stationary point of an implicit
function associated with an approximate minimum mean-squared error (MMSE)
denoiser. We numerically validate our method on two blind inverse problems:
automatic coil sensitivity estimation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and
blind image deblurring. Our results show that BC-PnP provides an efficient and
principled framework for using denoisers as PnP priors for jointly estimating
measurement operators and images
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