12 research outputs found
Image gathering and coding for digital restoration: Information efficiency and visual quality
Image gathering and coding are commonly treated as tasks separate from each other and from the digital processing used to restore and enhance the images. The goal is to develop a method that allows us to assess quantitatively the combined performance of image gathering and coding for the digital restoration of images with high visual quality. Digital restoration is often interactive because visual quality depends on perceptual rather than mathematical considerations, and these considerations vary with the target, the application, and the observer. The approach is based on the theoretical treatment of image gathering as a communication channel (J. Opt. Soc. Am. A2, 1644(1985);5,285(1988). Initial results suggest that the practical upper limit of the information contained in the acquired image data range typically from approximately 2 to 4 binary information units (bifs) per sample, depending on the design of the image-gathering system. The associated information efficiency of the transmitted data (i.e., the ratio of information over data) ranges typically from approximately 0.3 to 0.5 bif per bit without coding to approximately 0.5 to 0.9 bif per bit with lossless predictive compression and Huffman coding. The visual quality that can be attained with interactive image restoration improves perceptibly as the available information increases to approximately 3 bifs per sample. However, the perceptual improvements that can be attained with further increases in information are very subtle and depend on the target and the desired enhancement
Non-blind Image Restoration Based on Convolutional Neural Network
Blind image restoration processors based on convolutional neural network
(CNN) are intensively researched because of their high performance. However,
they are too sensitive to the perturbation of the degradation model. They
easily fail to restore the image whose degradation model is slightly different
from the trained degradation model. In this paper, we propose a non-blind
CNN-based image restoration processor, aiming to be robust against a
perturbation of the degradation model compared to the blind restoration
processor. Experimental comparisons demonstrate that the proposed non-blind
CNN-based image restoration processor can robustly restore images compared to
existing blind CNN-based image restoration processors.Comment: Accepted by IEEE 7th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics, 201
Real-World Image Restoration Using Degradation Adaptive Transformer-Based Adversarial Network
Most existing learning-based image restoration methods heavily rely on paired degraded/non-degraded training datasets that are based on simplistic handcrafted degradation assumptions. These assumptions often involve a limited set of degradations, such as Gaussian blurs, noises, and bicubic downsampling. However, when these methods are applied to real-world images, there is a significant decrease in performance due to the discrepancy between synthetic and realistic degradation. Additionally, they lack the flexibility to adapt to unknown degradations in practical scenarios, which limits their generalizability to complex and unconstrained scenes.
To address the absence of image pairs, recent studies have proposed Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based unpaired methods. Nevertheless, unpaired learning models based on convolution operations encounter challenges in capturing long-range pixel dependencies in real-world images. This limitation stems from their reliance on convolution operations, which offer local connectivity and translation equivariance but struggle to capture global dependencies due to their limited receptive field.
To address these challenges, this dissertation proposed an innovative unpaired image restoration basic model along with an advanced model. The proposed basic model is the DA-CycleGAN model, which is based on the CycleGAN [1] neural network and specifically designed for blind real-world Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). The DA-CycleGAN incorporates a degradation adaptive (DA) module to learn various real-world degradations (such as noise and blur patterns) in an unpaired manner, enabling strong flexible adaptation. Additionally, an advanced model called Trans-CycleGAN was designed, which integrated the Transformer architecture into CycleGAN to leverage its global connectivity. This combination allowed for image-to-image translation using CycleGAN [1] while enabling the Transformer to model global connectivity across long-range pixels. Extensive experiments conducted on realistic images demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in solving real-world image restoration problems, resulting in clearer and finer details.
Overall, this dissertation presents a novel unpaired image restoration basic model and an advanced model that effectively address the limitations of existing approaches. The proposed approach achieves significant advancements in handling real-world degradations and modeling long-range pixel dependencies, thereby offering substantial improvements in image restoration tasks.
Index Terms— Cross-domain translation, generative adversarial network, image restoration, super-resolution, transformer, unpaired training
Generalizing Supervised Deep Learning MRI Reconstruction to Multiple and Unseen Contrasts using Meta-Learning Hypernetworks
Meta-learning has recently been an emerging data-efficient learning technique
for various medical imaging operations and has helped advance contemporary deep
learning models. Furthermore, meta-learning enhances the knowledge
generalization of the imaging tasks by learning both shared and discriminative
weights for various configurations of imaging tasks. However, existing
meta-learning models attempt to learn a single set of weight initializations of
a neural network that might be restrictive for multimodal data. This work aims
to develop a multimodal meta-learning model for image reconstruction, which
augments meta-learning with evolutionary capabilities to encompass diverse
acquisition settings of multimodal data. Our proposed model called KM-MAML
(Kernel Modulation-based Multimodal Meta-Learning), has hypernetworks that
evolve to generate mode-specific weights. These weights provide the
mode-specific inductive bias for multiple modes by re-calibrating each kernel
of the base network for image reconstruction via a low-rank kernel modulation
operation. We incorporate gradient-based meta-learning (GBML) in the contextual
space to update the weights of the hypernetworks for different modes. The
hypernetworks and the reconstruction network in the GBML setting provide
discriminative mode-specific features and low-level image features,
respectively. Experiments on multi-contrast MRI reconstruction show that our
model, (i) exhibits superior reconstruction performance over joint training,
other meta-learning methods, and context-specific MRI reconstruction methods,
and (ii) better adaptation capabilities with improvement margins of 0.5 dB in
PSNR and 0.01 in SSIM. Besides, a representation analysis with U-Net shows that
kernel modulation infuses 80% of mode-specific representation changes in the
high-resolution layers. Our source code is available at
https://github.com/sriprabhar/KM-MAML/.Comment: Accepted for publication in Elsevier Applied Soft Computing Journal,
36 pages, 18 figure
NASA university program management information system, FY 1994
The University Program report, Fiscal Year 1994, provides current information and related statistics for 7841 grants/contracts/cooperative agreements active during the reporting period. NASA field centers and certain Headquarters program offices provide funds for those activities in universities which contribute to the mission needs of that particular NASA element. This annual report is one means of documenting the NASA-university relationship, frequently denoted, collectively, as NASA's University Program