Discriminative Transfer Learning for General Image Restoration

Recently, several discriminative learning approaches have been proposed for effective image restoration, achieving convincing trade-off between image quality and computational efficiency. However, these methods require separate training for each restoration task (e.g., denoising, deblurring, demosaicing) and problem condition (e.g., noise level of input images). This makes it time-consuming and difficult to encompass all tasks and conditions during training. In this paper, we propose a discriminative transfer learning method that incorporates formal proximal optimization and discriminative learning for general image restoration. The method requires a single-pass training and allows for reuse across various problems and conditions while achieving an efficiency comparable to previous discriminative approaches. Furthermore, after being trained, our model can be easily transferred to new likelihood terms to solve untrained tasks, or be combined with existing priors to further improve image restoration quality

A Wireless AI-Generated Content (AIGC) Provisioning Framework Empowered by Semantic Communication

Generative AI applications are recently catering to a vast user base by creating diverse and high-quality AI-generated content (AIGC). With the proliferation of mobile devices and rapid growth of mobile traffic, providing ubiquitous access to high-quality AIGC services via wireless communication networks is becoming the future direction for AIGC products. However, it is challenging to provide optimal AIGC services in wireless networks with unstable channels, limited bandwidth resources, and unevenly distributed computational resources. To tackle these challenges, we propose a semantic communication (SemCom)-empowered AIGC (SemAIGC) generation and transmission framework, where only semantic information of the content rather than all the binary bits should be extracted and transmitted by using SemCom. Specifically, SemAIGC integrates diffusion-based models within the semantic encoder and decoder for efficient content generation and flexible adjustment of the computing workload of both transmitter and receiver. Meanwhile, we devise a resource-aware workload trade-off (ROOT) scheme into the SemAIGC framework to intelligently decide transmitter/receiver workload, thus adjusting the utilization of computational resource according to service requirements. Simulations verify the superiority of our proposed SemAIGC framework in terms of latency and content quality compared to conventional approaches

Model-Based Deep Learning

Signal processing, communications, and control have traditionally relied on classical statistical modeling techniques. Such model-based methods utilize mathematical formulations that represent the underlying physics, prior information and additional domain knowledge. Simple classical models are useful but sensitive to inaccuracies and may lead to poor performance when real systems display complex or dynamic behavior. On the other hand, purely data-driven approaches that are model-agnostic are becoming increasingly popular as datasets become abundant and the power of modern deep learning pipelines increases. Deep neural networks (DNNs) use generic architectures which learn to operate from data, and demonstrate excellent performance, especially for supervised problems. However, DNNs typically require massive amounts of data and immense computational resources, limiting their applicability for some signal processing scenarios. We are interested in hybrid techniques that combine principled mathematical models with data-driven systems to benefit from the advantages of both approaches. Such model-based deep learning methods exploit both partial domain knowledge, via mathematical structures designed for specific problems, as well as learning from limited data. In this article we survey the leading approaches for studying and designing model-based deep learning systems. We divide hybrid model-based/data-driven systems into categories based on their inference mechanism. We provide a comprehensive review of the leading approaches for combining model-based algorithms with deep learning in a systematic manner, along with concrete guidelines and detailed signal processing oriented examples from recent literature. Our aim is to facilitate the design and study of future systems on the intersection of signal processing and machine learning that incorporate the advantages of both domains

Optimal sparsity allows reliable system-aware restoration of fluorescence microscopy images

Incluye: artículo, material suplementario, videos y software.Fluorescence microscopy is one of the most indispensable and informative driving forces for biological research, but the extent of observable biological phenomena is essentially determined by the content and quality of the acquired images. To address the different noise sources that can degrade these images, we introduce an algorithm for multiscale image restoration through optimally sparse representation (MIRO). MIRO is a deterministic framework that models the acquisition process and uses pixelwise noise correction to improve image quality. Our study demonstrates that this approach yields a remarkable restoration of the fluorescence signal for a wide range of microscopy systems, regardless of the detector used (e.g., electron-multiplying charge-coupled device, scientific complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, or photomultiplier tube). MIRO improves current imaging capabilities, enabling fast, low-light optical microscopy, accurate image analysis, and robust machine intelligence when integrated with deep neural networks. This expands the range of biological knowledge that can be obtained from fluorescence microscopy.We acknowledge the support of the National Institutes of Health grants R35GM124846 (to S.J.) and R01AA028527 (to C.X.), the National Science Foundation grants BIO2145235 and EFMA1830941 (to S.J.), and Marvin H. and Nita S. Floyd Research Fund (to S.J.). This research project was supported, in part, by the Emory University Integrated Cellular Imaging Microscopy Core and by PHS Grant UL1TR000454 from the Clinical and Translational Science Award Program, National Institutes of Health, and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.S

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