2,984 research outputs found
Image Restoration Using Very Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks with Symmetric Skip Connections
In this paper, we propose a very deep fully convolutional encoding-decoding
framework for image restoration such as denoising and super-resolution. The
network is composed of multiple layers of convolution and de-convolution
operators, learning end-to-end mappings from corrupted images to the original
ones. The convolutional layers act as the feature extractor, which capture the
abstraction of image contents while eliminating noises/corruptions.
De-convolutional layers are then used to recover the image details. We propose
to symmetrically link convolutional and de-convolutional layers with skip-layer
connections, with which the training converges much faster and attains a
higher-quality local optimum. First, The skip connections allow the signal to
be back-propagated to bottom layers directly, and thus tackles the problem of
gradient vanishing, making training deep networks easier and achieving
restoration performance gains consequently. Second, these skip connections pass
image details from convolutional layers to de-convolutional layers, which is
beneficial in recovering the original image. Significantly, with the large
capacity, we can handle different levels of noises using a single model.
Experimental results show that our network achieves better performance than all
previously reported state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted to Proc. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
(NIPS'16). Content of the final version may be slightly different. Extended
version is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.0892
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
Image interpolation using Shearlet based iterative refinement
This paper proposes an image interpolation algorithm exploiting sparse
representation for natural images. It involves three main steps: (a) obtaining
an initial estimate of the high resolution image using linear methods like FIR
filtering, (b) promoting sparsity in a selected dictionary through iterative
thresholding, and (c) extracting high frequency information from the
approximation to refine the initial estimate. For the sparse modeling, a
shearlet dictionary is chosen to yield a multiscale directional representation.
The proposed algorithm is compared to several state-of-the-art methods to
assess its objective as well as subjective performance. Compared to the cubic
spline interpolation method, an average PSNR gain of around 0.8 dB is observed
over a dataset of 200 images
- …