120 research outputs found
The effect of the color filter array layout choice on state-of-the-art demosaicing
Interpolation from a Color Filter Array (CFA) is the most common method for obtaining full color image data. Its success relies on the smart combination of a CFA and a demosaicing algorithm. Demosaicing on the one hand has been extensively studied. Algorithmic development in the past 20 years ranges from simple linear interpolation to modern neural-network-based (NN) approaches that encode the prior knowledge of millions of training images to fill in missing data in an inconspicious way. CFA design, on the other hand, is less well studied, although still recognized to strongly impact demosaicing performance. This is because demosaicing algorithms are typically limited to one particular CFA pattern, impeding straightforward CFA comparison. This is starting to change with newer classes of demosaicing that may be considered generic or CFA-agnostic. In this study, by comparing performance of two state-of-the-art generic algorithms, we evaluate the potential of modern CFA-demosaicing. We test the hypothesis that, with the increasing power of NN-based demosaicing, the influence of optimal CFA design on system performance decreases. This hypothesis is supported with the experimental results. Such a finding would herald the possibility of relaxing CFA requirements, providing more freedom in the CFA design choice and producing high-quality cameras
Make the Most Out of Your Net: Alternating Between Canonical and Hard Datasets for Improved Image Demosaicing
Image demosaicing is an important step in the image processing pipeline for
digital cameras, and it is one of the many tasks within the field of image
restoration. A well-known characteristic of natural images is that most patches
are smooth, while high-content patches like textures or repetitive patterns are
much rarer, which results in a long-tailed distribution. This distribution can
create an inductive bias when training machine learning algorithms for image
restoration tasks and for image demosaicing in particular. There have been many
different approaches to address this challenge, such as utilizing specific
losses or designing special network architectures. What makes our work is
unique in that it tackles the problem from a training protocol perspective. Our
proposed training regime consists of two key steps. The first step is a
data-mining stage where sub-categories are created and then refined through an
elimination process to only retain the most helpful sub-categories. The second
step is a cyclic training process where the neural network is trained on both
the mined sub-categories and the original dataset. We have conducted various
experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our training method for the
image demosaicing task. Our results show that this method outperforms standard
training across a range of architecture sizes and types, including CNNs and
Transformers. Moreover, we are able to achieve state-of-the-art results with a
significantly smaller neural network, compared to previous state-of-the-art
methods
Learning Raw Image Denoising with Bayer Pattern Unification and Bayer Preserving Augmentation
In this paper, we present new data pre-processing and augmentation techniques
for DNN-based raw image denoising. Compared with traditional RGB image
denoising, performing this task on direct camera sensor readings presents new
challenges such as how to effectively handle various Bayer patterns from
different data sources, and subsequently how to perform valid data augmentation
with raw images. To address the first problem, we propose a Bayer pattern
unification (BayerUnify) method to unify different Bayer patterns. This allows
us to fully utilize a heterogeneous dataset to train a single denoising model
instead of training one model for each pattern. Furthermore, while it is
essential to augment the dataset to improve model generalization and
performance, we discovered that it is error-prone to modify raw images by
adapting augmentation methods designed for RGB images. Towards this end, we
present a Bayer preserving augmentation (BayerAug) method as an effective
approach for raw image augmentation. Combining these data processing technqiues
with a modified U-Net, our method achieves a PSNR of 52.11 and a SSIM of 0.9969
in NTIRE 2019 Real Image Denoising Challenge, demonstrating the
state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at
https://github.com/Jiaming-Liu/BayerUnifyAug.Comment: Accepted by CVPRW 201
Wavelet/shearlet hybridized neural networks for biomedical image restoration
Recently, new programming paradigms have emerged that combine parallelism and numerical computations with algorithmic differentiation. This approach allows for the hybridization of neural network techniques for inverse imaging problems with more traditional methods such as wavelet-based sparsity modelling techniques. The benefits are twofold: on the one hand traditional methods with well-known properties can be integrated in neural networks, either as separate layers or tightly integrated in the network, on the other hand, parameters in traditional methods can be trained end-to-end from datasets in a neural network "fashion" (e.g., using Adagrad or Adam optimizers). In this paper, we explore these hybrid neural networks in the context of shearlet-based regularization for the purpose of biomedical image restoration. Due to the reduced number of parameters, this approach seems a promising strategy especially when dealing with small training data sets
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