This paper tackles a new problem setting: reinforcement learning with
pixel-wise rewards (pixelRL) for image processing. After the introduction of
the deep Q-network, deep RL has been achieving great success. However, the
applications of deep RL for image processing are still limited. Therefore, we
extend deep RL to pixelRL for various image processing applications. In
pixelRL, each pixel has an agent, and the agent changes the pixel value by
taking an action. We also propose an effective learning method for pixelRL that
significantly improves the performance by considering not only the future
states of the own pixel but also those of the neighbor pixels. The proposed
method can be applied to some image processing tasks that require pixel-wise
manipulations, where deep RL has never been applied. We apply the proposed
method to three image processing tasks: image denoising, image restoration, and
local color enhancement. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed
method achieves comparable or better performance, compared with the
state-of-the-art methods based on supervised learning.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201
