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

Deep Mean-Shift Priors for Image Restoration

In this paper we introduce a natural image prior that directly represents a Gaussian-smoothed version of the natural image distribution. We include our prior in a formulation of image restoration as a Bayes estimator that also allows us to solve noise-blind image restoration problems. We show that the gradient of our prior corresponds to the mean-shift vector on the natural image distribution. In addition, we learn the mean-shift vector field using denoising autoencoders, and use it in a gradient descent approach to perform Bayes risk minimization. We demonstrate competitive results for noise-blind deblurring, super-resolution, and demosaicing.Comment: NIPS 201

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

영상 복원 문제의 변분법적 접근

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 수리과학부, 2013. 2. 강명주.Image restoration has been an active research area in image processing and computer vision during the past several decades. We explore variational partial differential equations (PDE) models in image restoration problem. We start our discussion by reviewing classical models, by which the works of this dissertation are highly motivated. The content of the dissertation is divided into two main subjects. First topic is on image denoising, where we propose non-convex hybrid total variation model, and then we apply iterative reweighted algorithm to solve the proposed model. Second topic is on image decomposition, in which we separate an image into structural component and oscillatory component using local gradient constraint.Abstract i 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Image restoration 2 1.2 Brief overview of the dissertation 3 2 Previous works 4 2.1 Image denoising 4 2.1.1 Fundamental model 4 2.1.2 Higher order model 7 2.1.3 Hybrid model 9 2.1.4 Non-convex model 12 2.2 Image decomposition 22 2.2.1 Meyers model 23 2.2.2 Nonlinear filter 24 3 Non-convex hybrid TV for image denoising 28 3.1 Variational model with non-convex hybrid TV 29 3.1.1 Non-convex TV model and non-convex HOTV model 29 3.1.2 The Proposed model: Non-convex hybrid TV model 31 3.2 Iterative reweighted hybrid Total Variation algorithm 33 3.3 Numerical experiments 35 3.3.1 Parameter values 37 3.3.2 Comparison between the non-convex TV model and the non-convex HOTV model 38 3.3.3 Comparison with other non-convex higher order regularizers 40 3.3.4 Comparison between two non-convex hybrid TV models 42 3.3.5 Comparison with Krishnan et al. [39] 43 3.3.6 Comparison with state-of-the-art 44 4 Image decomposition 59 4.1 Local gradient constraint 61 4.1.1 Texture estimator 62 4.2 The proposed model 65 4.2.1 Algorithm : Anisotropic TV-L2 67 4.2.2 Algorithm : Isotropic TV-L2 69 4.2.3 Algorithm : Isotropic TV-L1 71 4.3 Numerical experiments and discussion 72 5 Conclusion and future works 80 Abstract (in Korean) 92Docto

Image Restoration

This book represents a sample of recent contributions of researchers all around the world in the field of image restoration. The book consists of 15 chapters organized in three main sections (Theory, Applications, Interdisciplinarity). Topics cover some different aspects of the theory of image restoration, but this book is also an occasion to highlight some new topics of research related to the emergence of some original imaging devices. From this arise some real challenging problems related to image reconstruction/restoration that open the way to some new fundamental scientific questions closely related with the world we interact with

Enhancing Image Quality: A Comparative Study of Spatial, Frequency Domain, and Deep Learning Methods

Image restoration and noise reduction methods have been created to restore deteriorated images and improve their quality. These methods have garnered substantial significance in recent times, mainly due to the growing utilization of digital imaging across diverse domains, including but not limited to medical imaging, surveillance, satellite imaging, and numerous others. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of three distinct approaches to image restoration: the spatial method, the frequency domain method, and the deep learning method. The study was conducted on a dataset of 10,000 images, and the performance of each method was evaluated using the accuracy and loss metrics. The results show that the deep learning method outperformed the other two methods, achieving a validation accuracy of 72.68% after 10 epochs. The spatial method had the lowest accuracy of the three, achieving a validation accuracy of 69.98% after 10 epochs. The FFT frequency domain method had a validation accuracy of 52.87% after 10 epochs, significantly lower than the other two methods. The study demonstrates that deep learning is a promising approach for image classification tasks and outperforms traditional methods such as spatial and frequency domain techniques