A Bayesian Hyperprior Approach for Joint Image Denoising and Interpolation, with an Application to HDR Imaging

Recently, impressive denoising results have been achieved by Bayesian approaches which assume Gaussian models for the image patches. This improvement in performance can be attributed to the use of per-patch models. Unfortunately such an approach is particularly unstable for most inverse problems beyond denoising. In this work, we propose the use of a hyperprior to model image patches, in order to stabilize the estimation procedure. There are two main advantages to the proposed restoration scheme: Firstly it is adapted to diagonal degradation matrices, and in particular to missing data problems (e.g. inpainting of missing pixels or zooming). Secondly it can deal with signal dependent noise models, particularly suited to digital cameras. As such, the scheme is especially adapted to computational photography. In order to illustrate this point, we provide an application to high dynamic range imaging from a single image taken with a modified sensor, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.Comment: Some figures are reduced to comply with arxiv's size constraints. Full size images are available as HAL technical report hal-01107519v5, IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, 201

Effective Image Restorations Using a Novel Spatial Adaptive Prior

Bayesian or Maximum a posteriori (MAP) approaches can effectively overcome the ill-posed problems of image restoration or deconvolution through incorporating a priori image information. Many restoration methods, such as nonquadratic prior Bayesian restoration and total variation regularization, have been proposed with edge-preserving and noise-removing properties. However, these methods are often inefficient in restoring continuous variation region and suppressing block artifacts. To handle this, this paper proposes a Bayesian restoration approach with a novel spatial adaptive (SA) prior. Through selectively and adaptively incorporating the nonlocal image information into the SA prior model, the proposed method effectively suppress the negative disturbance from irrelevant neighbor pixels, and utilizes the positive regularization from the relevant ones. A two-step restoration algorithm for the proposed approach is also given. Comparative experimentation and analysis demonstrate that, bearing high-quality edge-preserving and noise-removing properties, the proposed restoration also has good deblocking property