70 research outputs found
A Comparison of Image Denoising Methods
The advancement of imaging devices and countless images generated everyday
pose an increasingly high demand on image denoising, which still remains a
challenging task in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. To improve
denoising quality, numerous denoising techniques and approaches have been
proposed in the past decades, including different transforms, regularization
terms, algebraic representations and especially advanced deep neural network
(DNN) architectures. Despite their sophistication, many methods may fail to
achieve desirable results for simultaneous noise removal and fine detail
preservation. In this paper, to investigate the applicability of existing
denoising techniques, we compare a variety of denoising methods on both
synthetic and real-world datasets for different applications. We also introduce
a new dataset for benchmarking, and the evaluations are performed from four
different perspectives including quantitative metrics, visual effects, human
ratings and computational cost. Our experiments demonstrate: (i) the
effectiveness and efficiency of representative traditional denoisers for
various denoising tasks, (ii) a simple matrix-based algorithm may be able to
produce similar results compared with its tensor counterparts, and (iii) the
notable achievements of DNN models, which exhibit impressive generalization
ability and show state-of-the-art performance on various datasets. In spite of
the progress in recent years, we discuss shortcomings and possible extensions
of existing techniques. Datasets, code and results are made publicly available
and will be continuously updated at
https://github.com/ZhaomingKong/Denoising-Comparison.Comment: In this paper, we intend to collect and compare various denoising
methods to investigate their effectiveness, efficiency, applicability and
generalization ability with both synthetic and real-world experiment
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
Adaptive Edge-guided Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) Image Denoising Algorithm
Image denoising is a well studied field, yet reducing noise from images is still a valid challenge. Recently proposed Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) is the current state of the art algorithm for denoising images corrupted by Additive White Gaussian noise (AWGN). Though BM3D outperforms all existing methods for AWGN denoising, still its performance decreases as the noise level increases in images, since it is harder to find proper match for reference blocks in the presence of highly corrupted pixel values. It also blurs sharp edges and textures. To overcome these problems we proposed an edge guided BM3D with selective pixel restoration. For higher noise levels it is possible to detect noisy pixels form its neighborhoods gray level statistics. We exploited this property to reduce noise as much as possible by applying a pre-filter. We also introduced an edge guided pixel restoration process in the hard-thresholding step of BM3D to restore the sharpness of edges and textures. Experimental results confirm that our proposed method is competitive and outperforms the state of the art BM3D in all considered subjective and objective quality measurements, particularly in preserving edges, textures and image contrast
Image Restoration for Remote Sensing: Overview and Toolbox
Remote sensing provides valuable information about objects or areas from a
distance in either active (e.g., RADAR and LiDAR) or passive (e.g.,
multispectral and hyperspectral) modes. The quality of data acquired by
remotely sensed imaging sensors (both active and passive) is often degraded by
a variety of noise types and artifacts. Image restoration, which is a vibrant
field of research in the remote sensing community, is the task of recovering
the true unknown image from the degraded observed image. Each imaging sensor
induces unique noise types and artifacts into the observed image. This fact has
led to the expansion of restoration techniques in different paths according to
each sensor type. This review paper brings together the advances of image
restoration techniques with particular focuses on synthetic aperture radar and
hyperspectral images as the most active sub-fields of image restoration in the
remote sensing community. We, therefore, provide a comprehensive,
discipline-specific starting point for researchers at different levels (i.e.,
students, researchers, and senior researchers) willing to investigate the
vibrant topic of data restoration by supplying sufficient detail and
references. Additionally, this review paper accompanies a toolbox to provide a
platform to encourage interested students and researchers in the field to
further explore the restoration techniques and fast-forward the community. The
toolboxes are provided in https://github.com/ImageRestorationToolbox.Comment: This paper is under review in GRS
Adaptive nonlocal and structured sparse signal modeling and applications
Features based on sparse representation, especially using the synthesis dictionary model, have been heavily exploited in signal processing and computer vision. Many applications such as image and video denoising, inpainting, demosaicing, super-resolution, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computed tomography (CT) reconstruction have been shown to benefit from adaptive sparse signal modeling. However, synthesis dictionary learning typically involves expensive sparse coding and learning steps. Recently, sparsifying transform learning received interest for its cheap computation and its optimal updates in the alternating algorithms. Prior works on transform learning have certain limitations, including (1) limited model richness and structure for handling diverse data, (2) lack of non-local structure, and (3) lack of effective extension to high-dimensional or streaming data. This dissertation focuses on advanced data-driven sparse modeling techniques, especially with nonlocal and structured sparse signal modeling.
In the first work of this dissertation, we propose a methodology for learning, dubbed Flipping and Rotation Invariant Sparsifying Transforms (FRIST), to better represent natural images that contain textures with various geometrical directions. The proposed alternating FRIST learning algorithm involves efficient optimal updates. We provide a convergence guarantee, and demonstrate the empirical convergence behavior of the proposed FRIST learning approach. Preliminary experiments show the promising performance of FRIST learning for image sparse representation, segmentation, denoising, robust inpainting, and compressed sensing-based magnetic resonance image reconstruction. Next, we present an online high-dimensional sparsifying transform learning method for spatio-temporal data, and demonstrate its usefulness with a novel video denoising framework, dubbed VIDOSAT. The proposed method is based on our previous work on online sparsifying transform learning, which has low computational and memory costs, and can potentially handle streaming video. By combining with a block matching (BM) technique, the learned model can effectively adapt to video data with various motions. The patches are constructed either from corresponding 2D patches in successive frames or using an online block matching technique. The proposed online video denoising requires little memory and others efficient processing. Numerical experiments are used to analyze the contribution of the various components of the proposed video denoising scheme by "switching off" these components - for example, fixing the transform to be 3D DCT, rather than a learned transform. Other experiments compare to the performance of prior schemes such as dictionary learning-based schemes, and the state-of-the-art VBM3D and VBM4D on several video data sets, demonstrating the promising performance of the proposed methods. In the third part of the dissertation, we propose a joint sparse and low-rank model, dubbed STROLLR, to better represent natural images. Patch-based methods exploit local patch sparsity, whereas other works apply low-rankness of grouped patches to exploit image non-local structures. However, using either approach alone usually limits performance in image restoration applications. In order to fully utilize both the local and non-local image properties, we develop an image restoration framework using a transform learning scheme with joint low-rank regularization. The approach owes some of its computational efficiency and good performance to the use of transform learning for adaptive sparse representation rather than the popular synthesis dictionary learning algorithms, which involve approximation of NP-hard sparse coding and expensive learning steps. We demonstrate the proposed framework in various applications to image denoising, inpainting, and compressed sensing based magnetic resonance imaging. Results show promising performance compared to state-of-the-art competing methods. Last, we extend the effective joint sparsity and low-rankness model from image to video applications. We propose a novel video denoising method, based on an online tensor reconstruction scheme with a joint adaptive sparse and low-rank model, dubbed SALT. An efficient and unsupervised online unitary sparsifying transform learning method is introduced to impose adaptive sparsity on the fly. We develop an efficient 3D spatio-temporal data reconstruction framework based on the proposed online learning method, which exhibits low latency and can potentially handle streaming videos. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that combines adaptive sparsity and low-rankness for video denoising, and the first work that solves the proposed problem in an online fashion. We demonstrate video denoising results over commonly used videos from public datasets. Numerical experiments show that the proposed video denoising method outperforms competing methods
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