Unsupervised training of deep learning based image denoisers from undersampled measurements

Department of Electrical EngineeringCompressive sensing is a method to recover the original image from undersampled measurements. In order to overcome the ill-posedness of this inverse problem, image priors are used such as sparsity, minimal total-variation, or self-similarity of images. Recently, deep learning based compressive image recovery methods have been proposed and have yielded state-of-the-art performances. They used data-driven approaches instead of hand-crafted image priors to regularize ill-posed inverse problems with undersampled data. Ironically, training deep neural networks (DNNs) for them requires ???clean??? ground truth images, but obtaining the best quality images from undersampled data requires well-trained DNNs. To resolve this dilemma, we propose novel methods based on two well-grounded theories: denoiser-approximate message passing (D-AMP) and Stein???s unbiased risk estimator (SURE). Our proposed methods, LDAMP SURE and LDAMP SURE-T, were able to train deep learning based image denoisers from undersampled measurements without ground truth images and without additional image priors and to recover images with state-of-the-art qualities from undersampled data. We evaluated our methods for various compressive sensing recovery problems with Gaussian random, coded diffraction pattern, and compressive sensing MRI (CS-MRI) measurement matrices. Our proposed methods yielded state-of-the-art performances for all cases without ground truth images. Our methods also yielded comparable performances to the approaches with ground truth data. Moreover, we have extended our methods to deal with a Gaussian noise in a measurement domain and further enhance reconstruction quality by developing an image refining method called LDAMP SURE-FT.clos

Extending Stein???s Unbiased Risk Estimator To Train Deep Denoisers with Correlated Pairs of Noisy Images

Recently, Stein???s unbiased risk estimator (SURE) has been applied to unsupervised training of deep neural network Gaussian denoisers that outperformed classical non-deep learning based denoisers and yielded comparable performance to those trained with ground truth. While SURE requires only one noise realization per image for training, it does not take advantage of having multiple noise realizations per image when they are available (e.g., two uncorrelated noise realizations per image for Noise2Noise). Here, we propose an extended SURE (eSURE) to train deep denoisers with correlated pairs of noise realizations per image and applied it to the case with two uncorrelated realizations per image to achieve better performance than SURE based method and comparable results to Noise2Noise. Then, we further investigated the case with imperfect ground truth (i.e., mild noise in ground truth) that may be obtained considering painstaking, time-consuming, and even expensive processes of collecting ground truth images with multiple noisy images. For the case of generating noisy training data by adding synthetic noise to imperfect ground truth to yield correlated pairs of images, our proposed eSURE based training method outperformed conventional SURE based method as well as Noise2Noise. Code is available at https://github.com/Magauiya/Extended_SUR

Unsupervised learning of denoisers with compressive sensing measurements

Recently, deep learning based compressive recovery methods have been proposed and have yielded state-of-the-art performances. Ironically, training deep neural networks for them requires ???clean??? ground truth, but obtaining the best quality images from undersampled data requires well-trained deep networks. To resolve this dilemma, we propose methods that are able to train deep denoisers from undersampled measurements without ground truth. Our methods yielded comparable performances to the methods with ground truth for various image recovery problems

Training Deep Learning Based Image Denoisers From Undersampled Measurements Without Ground Truth and Without Image Prior

Compressive sensing is a method to recover the original image from undersampled measurements. In order to overcome the ill-posedness of this inverse problem, image priors are used such as sparsity, minimal total-variation, or self-similarity of images. Recently, deep learning based compressive image recovery methods have been proposed and have yielded state-of-the-art performances. They used data-driven approaches instead of hand-crafted image priors to regularize ill-posed inverse problems with undersampled data. Ironically, training deep neural networks (DNNs) for them requires ???clean??? ground truth images, but obtaining the best quality images from undersampled data requires well-trained DNNs. To resolve this dilemma, we propose novel methods based on two well-grounded theories: denoiser-approximate message passing (D-AMP) and Stein???s unbiased risk estimator (SURE). Our proposed methods were able to train deep learning based image denoisers from undersampled measurements without ground truth images and without additional image priors, and to recover images with state-of-the-art qualities from undersampled data. We evaluated our methods for various compressive sensing recovery problems with Gaussian random, coded diffraction pattern, and compressive sensing MRI measurement matrices. Our proposed methods yielded state-of-the-art performances for all cases without ground truth images. Our methods also yielded comparable performances to the methods with ground truth data

NTIRE 2019 Challenge on Real Image Denoising: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2019 challenge on real image denoising with focus on the proposed methods and their results. The challenge has two tracks for quantitatively evaluating image denoising performance in (1) the Bayer- pattern raw-RGB and (2) the standard RGB (sRGB) color spaces. The tracks had 216 and 220 registered participants, respectively. A total of 15 teams, proposing 17 methods, competed in the final phase of the challenge. The proposed methods by the 15 teams represent the current state-of-the- art performance in image denoising targeting real noisy im- ages