801 research outputs found
No-reference Image Denoising Quality Assessment
A wide variety of image denoising methods are available now. However, the
performance of a denoising algorithm often depends on individual input noisy
images as well as its parameter setting. In this paper, we present a
no-reference image denoising quality assessment method that can be used to
select for an input noisy image the right denoising algorithm with the optimal
parameter setting. This is a challenging task as no ground truth is available.
This paper presents a data-driven approach to learn to predict image denoising
quality. Our method is based on the observation that while individual existing
quality metrics and denoising models alone cannot robustly rank denoising
results, they often complement each other. We accordingly design denoising
quality features based on these existing metrics and models and then use Random
Forests Regression to aggregate them into a more powerful unified metric. Our
experiments on images with various types and levels of noise show that our
no-reference denoising quality assessment method significantly outperforms the
state-of-the-art quality metrics. This paper also provides a method that
leverages our quality assessment method to automatically tune the parameter
settings of a denoising algorithm for an input noisy image to produce an
optimal denoising result.Comment: 17 pages, 41 figures, accepted by Computer Vision Conference (CVC)
201
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
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