Nonlocal self-similarity within natural images has become an increasingly
popular prior in deep-learning models. Despite their successful image
restoration performance, such models remain largely uninterpretable due to
their black-box construction. Our previous studies have shown that
interpretable construction of a fully convolutional denoiser (CDLNet), with
performance on par with state-of-the-art black-box counterparts, is achievable
by unrolling a dictionary learning algorithm. In this manuscript, we seek an
interpretable construction of a convolutional network with a nonlocal
self-similarity prior that performs on par with black-box nonlocal models. We
show that such an architecture can be effectively achieved by upgrading the
ℓ1 sparsity prior of CDLNet to a weighted group-sparsity prior. From this
formulation, we propose a novel sliding-window nonlocal operation, enabled by
sparse array arithmetic. In addition to competitive performance with black-box
nonlocal DNNs, we demonstrate the proposed sliding-window sparse attention
enables inference speeds greater than an order of magnitude faster than its
competitors.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, 6 table