Convolutional layers in Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) treat the channel features equally without feature selection flexibility. While using ANNs for image denoising in real-world applications with unknown noise distributions, particularly structured noise with learnable patterns, modeling informative features can substantially boost the performance. Channel attention methods in real image denoising tasks exploit dependencies between the feature channels, hence being a frequency component filtering mechanism. Existing channel attention modules typically use global statics as descriptors to learn the inter-channel correlations. This method deems inefficient at learning representative coefficients for re-scaling the channels in frequency level. This paper proposes a novel Sub-band Pyramid Attention (SPA) based on wavelet sub-band pyramid to recalibrate the frequency components of the extracted features in a more fine-grained fashion. We equip the SPA blocks on a network designed for real image denoising. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a remarkable improvement than the benchmark naive channel attention block. Furthermore, our results show how the pyramid level affects the performance of the SPA blocks and exhibits favorable generalization capability for the SPA blocks.
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；GuangDong TUS-TuWei Technology Co.,Ltd（广东拓思途维科技有限公司）
While deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown extraordinary capability of modelling specific noise and denoising, they still perform poorly on real-world noisy images. The main reason is that the real-world noise is more sophisticated and diverse. To tackle the issue of blind denoising, in this paper, we propose a novel pyramid real image denoising network (PRIDNet), which contains three stages. First, the noise estimation stage uses channel attention mechanism to recalibrate the channel importance of input noise. Second, at the multi-scale denoising stage, pyramid pooling is util…
Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning for Single-shot Test-time Ultrasound Image Denoising
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学电子与计算机工程系）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University（达特茅斯大学生物医学工程系）
Imaging under photon-scarce situations introduces challenges to many applications as the captured images are with low signal-to-noise ratio and poor luminance. In this paper, we investigate the raw image restoration under low-photon-count conditions by simulating the imaging of quanta image sensor (QIS). We develop a lightweight framework, which consists of a multi-level pyramid denoising network (MPDNet) and a luminance adjustment (LA) module to achieve separate denoising and luminance enhancement. The main component of our framework is the multi-skip attention residual block (MARB), which in…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；IHPC, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究所）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Singapore Eye Research Institute（新加坡眼科研究所）；Singapore National Eye Centre（新加坡全国眼科中心）
As an economical and efficient fundus imaging modality, retinal fundus images have been widely adopted in clinical fundus examination. Unfortunately, fundus images often suffer from quality degradation caused by imaging interferences, leading to misdiagnosis. Despite impressive enhancement performances that state-of-the-art methods have achieved, challenges remain in clinical scenarios. For boosting the clinical deployment of fundus image enhancement, this paper proposes the pyramid constraint to develop a degradation-invariant enhancement network (PCE-Net), which mitigates the demand for clin…
UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）
Self-similarity refers to the image prior widely used in image restoration algorithms that small but similar patterns tend to occur at different locations and scales. However, recent advanced deep convolutional neural network based methods for image restoration do not take full advantage of self-similarities by relying on self-attention neural modules that only process information at the same scale. To solve this problem, we present a novel Pyramid Attention module for image restoration, which captures long-range feature correspondences from a multi-scale feature pyramid. Inspired by the fact …
Technion Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Image denoising is a well studied problem with an extensive activity that has spread over several decades. Despite the many available denoising algorithms, the quest for simple, powerful and fast denoisers is still an active and vibrant topic of research. Leading classical denoising methods are typically designed to exploit the inner structure in images by modeling local overlapping patches, while operating in an unsupervised fashion. In contrast, recent newcomers to this arena are supervised and universal neural-network-based methods that bypass this modeling altogether, targeting the inferen…
Existing neural networks proposed for low-level image processing tasks are usually implemented by stacking convolution layers with limited kernel size. Every convolution layer merely involves in context information from a small local neighborhood. More contextual features can be explored as more convolution layers are adopted. However it is difficult and costly to take full advantage of long-range dependencies. We propose a novel non-local module, Pyramid Non-local Block, to build up connection between every pixel and all remain pixels. The proposed module is capable of efficiently exploiting …
University of Goettingen（哥廷根大学）；Statistical and Applied Mathematical Science Institute（统计与应用数学科学研究所）
We consider the very challenging task of restoring images (i) which have a large number of missing pixels, (ii) whose existing pixels are corrupted by noise and (iii) the ideal image to be restored contains both cartoon and texture elements. The combination of these three properties makes this inverse problem a very difficult one. The solution proposed in this manuscript is based on directional global three-part decomposition (DG3PD) [ThaiGottschlich2016] with directional total variation norm, directional G-norm and $\ell_\infty$-norm in curvelet domain as key ingredients of the model. Image d…
Learning Multi-scale Spatial-frequency Features for Image Denoising
PCA Lab, Key Lab of Intelligent Perception and Systems for High-Dimensional Information of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology（智能科学与技术学院）
School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校数学学院）
We analyze the Laplacian pyramids algorithm of Rabin and Coifman for extending and denoising a function sampled on a discrete set of points. We provide mild conditions under which the algorithm converges, and prove stability bounds on the extended function. We also consider the iterative application of truncated Laplacian pyramids kernels for denoising signals by non-local means.
Qingdao University（青岛大学）；Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）
Images captured underwater are often characterized by low contrast, color distortion, and noise. To address these visual degradations, we propose a novel scheme by constructing an adaptive color and contrast enhancement, and denoising (ACCE-D) framework for underwater image enhancement. In the proposed framework, Difference of Gaussian (DoG) filter and bilateral filter are respectively employed to decompose the high-frequency and low-frequency components. Benefited from this separation, we utilize soft-thresholding operation to suppress the noise in the high-frequency component. Specially, the…
Given a set of image denoisers, each having a different denoising capability, is there a provably optimal way of combining these denoisers to produce an overall better result? An answer to this question is fundamental to designing an ensemble of weak estimators for complex scenes. In this paper, we present an optimal combination scheme by leveraging deep neural networks and convex optimization. The proposed framework, called the Consensus Neural Network (CsNet), introduces three new concepts in image denoising: (1) A provably optimal procedure to combine the denoised outputs via convex optimiz…
Boosting ViT-based MRI Reconstruction from the Perspectives of Frequency Modulation, Spatial Purification, and Scale Diversification
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Digital Medical Research Center（数字医学研究中心）；School of Basic Medical Science（基础医学院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention（上海医学影像计算与计算机辅助干预重点实验室）；Academy for Engineering and Technology（工程与技术学院）
Center For Data Science, NYU（纽约大学数据科学中心）；School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, ASU（亚利桑那州立大学材料、运输与工程学院）；Center for Neural Science, NYU（纽约大学神经科学中心）；Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation（西蒙斯基金会弗拉蒂伦研究所）；Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU（纽约大学柯朗数学科学研究所）
Boosting Image Restoration via Priors from Pre-trained Models
Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；CUHK（香港中文大学）；RealityEdge（睿迪智芯）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Institute of Collaborative Innovation（协同创新研究院）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Bytedance Inc.（字节跳动公司）
While scale-invariant modeling has substantially boosted the performance of visual recognition tasks, it remains largely under-explored in deep networks based image restoration. Naively applying those scale-invariant techniques (e.g. multi-scale testing, random-scale data augmentation) to image restoration tasks usually leads to inferior performance. In this paper, we show that properly modeling scale-invariance into neural networks can bring significant benefits to image restoration performance. Inspired from spatial-wise convolution for shift-invariance, "scale-wise convolution" is proposed …
Collaborative Innovation Center for Biomedical Engineering, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics-Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学武汉光电国家研究中心生物医学工程协同创新中心）；Britton Chance Center and MOE Key Laboratory for Biomedical Photonics, School of Engineering Sciences, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学工程科学学院Britton Chance中心及教育部生物医学光子学重点实验室）；School of Mathematics and Economics, Hubei University of Education（湖北第二师范学院数学与经济学院）
Convolution system is linear and time invariant, and can describe the optical imaging process. Based on convolution system, many deconvolution techniques have been developed for optical image analysis, such as boosting the space resolution of optical images, image denoising, image enhancement and so on. Here, we gave properties on N-dimensional convolution. By using these properties, we proposed image deconvolution method. This method uses a series of convolution operations to deconvolute image. We demonstrated that the method has the similar deconvolution results to the state-of-art method. T…
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；The Open University of Hong Kong（香港公开大学）
Maritime images captured under low-light imaging condition easily suffer from low visibility and unexpected noise, leading to negative effects on maritime traffic supervision and management. To promote imaging performance, it is necessary to restore the important visual information from degraded low-light images. In this paper, we propose to enhance the low-light images through regularized illumination optimization and deep noise suppression. In particular, a hybrid regularized variational model, which combines L0-norm gradient sparsity prior with structure-aware regularization, is presented t…
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Recent work in image processing suggests that operating on (overlapping) patches in an image may lead to state-of-the-art results. This has been demonstrated for a variety of problems including denoising, inpainting, deblurring, and super-resolution. The work reported in [1,2] takes an extra step forward by showing that ordering these patches to form an approximate shortest path can be leveraged for better processing. The core idea is to apply a simple filter on the resulting 1D smoothed signal obtained after the patch-permutation. This idea has been also explored in combination with a wavelet…
As the popularity of mobile photography is growing constantly, lots of efforts are being invested now into building complex hand-crafted camera ISP solutions. In this work, we demonstrate that even the most sophisticated ISP pipelines can be replaced with a single end-to-end deep learning model trained without any prior knowledge about the sensor and optics used in a particular device. For this, we present PyNET, a novel pyramidal CNN architecture designed for fine-grained image restoration that implicitly learns to perform all ISP steps such as image demosaicing, denoising, white balancing, c…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Ghosting artifacts, motion blur, and low fidelity in highlight are the main challenges in High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging from multiple Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images. These issues come from using the medium-exposed image as the reference frame in previous methods. To deal with them, we propose to use the under-exposed image as the reference to avoid these issues. However, the heavy noise in dark regions of the under-exposed image becomes a new problem. Therefore, we propose a joint HDR and denoising pipeline, containing two sub-networks: (i) a pre-denoising network (PreDNNet) to adaptively d…
We explore means to advance source camera identification based on sensor noise in a data-driven framework. Our focus is on improving the sensor pattern noise (SPN) extraction from a single image at test time. Where existing works suppress nuisance content with denoising filters that are largely agnostic to the specific SPN signal of interest, we demonstrate that a~deep learning approach can yield a more suitable extractor that leads to improved source attribution. A series of extensive experiments on various public datasets confirms the feasibility of our approach and its applicability to imag…
Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Inception Institute of AI（英赛普申人工智能研究院）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Yonsei University（延世大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Modern handheld devices can acquire burst image sequence in a quick succession. However, the individual acquired frames suffer from multiple degradations and are misaligned due to camera shake and object motions. The goal of Burst Image Restoration is to effectively combine complimentary cues across multiple burst frames to generate high-quality outputs. Towards this goal, we develop a novel approach by solely focusing on the effective information exchange between burst frames, such that the degradations get filtered out while the actual scene details are preserved and enhanced. Our central id…
The explosive rise of the use of Computer tomography (CT) imaging in medical practice has heightened public concern over the patient's associated radiation dose. However, reducing the radiation dose leads to increased noise and artifacts, which adversely degrades the scan's interpretability. Consequently, an advanced image reconstruction algorithm to improve the diagnostic performance of low dose ct arose as the primary concern among the researchers, which is challenging due to the ill-posedness of the problem. In recent times, the deep learning-based technique has emerged as a dominant method…
The paper presents an image denoising algorithm by combining a method that is based on directional quasi-analytic wavelet packets (qWPs) with the popular BM3D algorithm. The qWPs and its corresponding transforms are designed in [1]. The denoising algorithm qWP (qWPdn) applies an adaptive localized soft thresholding to the transform coefficients using the Bivariate Shrinkage methodology. The combined method consists of several iterations of qWPdn and BM3D algorithms, where the output from one algorithm updates the input to the other (cross-boosting).The qWPdn and BM3D methods complement each ot…
Plug-and-play priors (PnP) is an image reconstruction framework that uses an image denoiser as an imaging prior. Unlike traditional regularized inversion, PnP does not require the prior to be expressible in the form of a regularization function. This flexibility enables PnP algorithms to exploit the most effective image denoisers, leading to their state-of-the-art performance in various imaging tasks. In this paper, we propose a new denoiser scaling technique to explicitly control the amount of PnP regularization. Traditionally, the performance of PnP algorithms is controlled via intrinsic par…
