Neural Gradient Regularizer

Owing to its significant success, the prior imposed on gradient maps has consistently been a subject of great interest in the field of image processing. Total variation (TV), one of the most representative regularizers, is known for its ability to capture the sparsity of gradient maps. Nonetheless, TV and its variants often underestimate the gradient maps, leading to the weakening of edges and details whose gradients should not be zero in the original image. Recently, total deep variation (TDV) has been introduced, assuming the sparsity of feature maps, which provides a flexible regularization learned from large-scale datasets for a specific task. However, TDV requires retraining when the image or task changes, limiting its versatility. In this paper, we propose a neural gradient regularizer (NGR) that expresses the gradient map as the output of a neural network. Unlike existing methods, NGR does not rely on the sparsity assumption, thereby avoiding the underestimation of gradient maps. NGR is applicable to various image types and different image processing tasks, functioning in a zero-shot learning fashion, making it a versatile and plug-and-play regularizer. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of NGR over state-of-the-art counterparts for a range of different tasks, further validating its effectiveness and versatility

A Constrained Convex Optimization Approach to Hyperspectral Image Restoration with Hybrid Spatio-Spectral Regularization

We propose a new constrained optimization approach to hyperspectral (HS) image restoration. Most existing methods restore a desirable HS image by solving some optimization problem, which consists of a regularization term(s) and a data-fidelity term(s). The methods have to handle a regularization term(s) and a data-fidelity term(s) simultaneously in one objective function, and so we need to carefully control the hyperparameter(s) that balances these terms. However, the setting of such hyperparameters is often a troublesome task because their suitable values depend strongly on the regularization terms adopted and the noise intensities on a given observation. Our proposed method is formulated as a convex optimization problem, where we utilize a novel hybrid regularization technique named Hybrid Spatio-Spectral Total Variation (HSSTV) and incorporate data-fidelity as hard constraints. HSSTV has a strong ability of noise and artifact removal while avoiding oversmoothing and spectral distortion, without combining other regularizations such as low-rank modeling-based ones. In addition, the constraint-type data-fidelity enables us to translate the hyperparameters that balance between regularization and data-fidelity to the upper bounds of the degree of data-fidelity that can be set in a much easier manner. We also develop an efficient algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to efficiently solve the optimization problem. Through comprehensive experiments, we illustrate the advantages of the proposed method over various HS image restoration methods including state-of-the-art ones.Comment: 20 pages, 4 tables, 10 figures, submitted to MDPI Remote Sensin