The vast majority of image recovery tasks are ill-posed problems. As such, methods that are based on optimization use cost functions that consist of both fidelity and prior (regularization) terms. A recent line of works imposes the prior by the Regularization by Denoising (RED) approach, which exploits the good performance of existing image denoising engines. Yet, the relation of RED to explicit prior terms is still not well understood, as previous work requires too strong assumptions on the denoisers. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we show that the RED gradient can be seen as a (sub)gradient of a prior function--but taken at a denoised version of the point. As RED is typically applied with a relatively small noise level, this interpretation indicates a similarity between RED and traditional gradients. This leads to our second contribution: We propose to combine RED with the Back-Projection (BP) fidelity term rather than the common Least Squares (LS) term that is used in previous works. We show that the advantages of BP over LS for image deblurring and super-resolution, which have been demonstrated for traditional gradients, carry on to the RED approach.
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Deep learning (DL) based hyperspectral images (HSIs) denoising approaches directly learn the nonlinear mapping between observed noisy images and underlying clean images. They normally do not consider the physical characteristics of HSIs, therefore making them lack of interpretability that is key to understand their denoising mechanism.. In order to tackle this problem, we introduce a novel model guided interpretable network for HSI denoising. Specifically, fully considering the spatial redundancy, spectral low-rankness and spectral-spatial properties of HSIs, we first establish a subspace base…
Features obtained from object recognition CNNs have been widely used for measuring perceptual similarities between images. Such differentiable metrics can be used as perceptual learning losses to train image enhancement models. However, the choice of the distance function between input and target features may have a consequential impact on the performance of the trained model. While using the norm of the difference between extracted features leads to limited hallucination of details, measuring the distance between distributions of features may generate more textures; yet also more unrealistic …
Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad（印度理工学院（ISM）丹巴德分校）；UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）
Learning to dehaze single hazy images, especially using a small training dataset is quite challenging. We propose a novel generative adversarial network architecture for this problem, namely back projected pyramid network (BPPNet), that gives good performance for a variety of challenging haze conditions, including dense haze and inhomogeneous haze. Our architecture incorporates learning of multiple levels of complexities while retaining spatial context through iterative blocks of UNets and structural information of multiple scales through a novel pyramidal convolution block. These blocks toget…
In this paper, we propose an invertible neural network for image denoising (DnINN) inspired by the transform-based denoising framework. The proposed DnINN consists of an invertible neural network called LINN whose architecture is inspired by the lifting scheme in wavelet theory and a sparsity-driven denoising network which is used to remove noise from the transform coefficients. The denoising operation is performed with a single soft-thresholding operation or with a learned iterative shrinkage thresholding network. The forward pass of LINN produces an over-complete representation which is more…
This paper evaluates the performance of supervised and unsupervised deep learning models for denoising positron emission tomography (PET) images in the presence of reduced acquisition times. Our experiments consider 212 studies (56908 images), and evaluate the models using 2D (RMSE, SSIM) and 3D (SUVpeak and SUVmax error for the regions of interest) metrics. It was shown that, in contrast to previous studies, supervised models (ResNet, Unet, SwinIR) outperform unsupervised models (pix2pix GAN and CycleGAN with ResNet backbone and various auxiliary losses) in the reconstruction of 2D PET images…
Task-based Regularization in Penalized Least-Squares for Binary Signal Detection Tasks in Medical Image Denoising
University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute（密歇根大学-上海交通大学联合研究院）；Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学未来科技全球研究院）；Wyant College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学怀恩特光学科学学院）；Department of Medical Imaging, University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学医学影像系）
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Deepwise（深睿医疗）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
The effectiveness of existing denoising algorithms typically relies on accurate pre-defined noise statistics or plenty of paired data, which limits their practicality. In this work, we focus on denoising in the more common case where noise statistics and paired data are unavailable. Considering that denoising CNNs require supervision, we develop a new \textbf{adaptive noise imitation (ADANI)} algorithm that can synthesize noisy data from naturally noisy images. To produce realistic noise, a noise generator takes unpaired noisy/clean images as input, where the noisy image is a guide for noise g…
For flexible non-blind image denoising, existing deep networks usually take both noisy image and noise level map as the input to handle various noise levels with a single model. However, in this kind of solution, the noise variance (i.e., noise level) is only deployed to modulate the first layer of convolution feature with channel-wise shifting, which is limited in balancing noise removal and detail preservation. In this paper, we present a novel flexible image enoising network (CFMNet) by equipping an U-Net backbone with multi-layer conditional feature modulation (CFM) modules. In comparison …
We propose to learn a fully-convolutional network model that consists of a Chain of Identity Mapping Modules and residual on the residual architecture for image denoising. Our network structure possesses three distinctive features that are important for the noise removal task. Firstly, each unit employs identity mappings as the skip connections and receives pre-activated input to preserve the gradient magnitude propagated in both the forward and backward directions. Secondly, by utilizing dilated kernels for the convolution layers in the residual branch, each neuron in the last convolution lay…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61-CSIRO；OPPO US Research（OPPO美国研究院）；GSAI POSTECH（浦项科技大学GSAI）
Invertible networks have various benefits for image denoising since they are lightweight, information-lossless, and memory-saving during back-propagation. However, applying invertible models to remove noise is challenging because the input is noisy, and the reversed output is clean, following two different distributions. We propose an invertible denoising network, InvDN, to address this challenge. InvDN transforms the noisy input into a low-resolution clean image and a latent representation containing noise. To discard noise and restore the clean image, InvDN replaces the noisy latent represen…
A CT Image Denoising Method Based on Projection Domain Feature
National Center for Applied Mathematics Shenzhen (NCAMS), Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学 深圳应用数学中心（NCAMS））；The Smart City Research Institute of CETC（中国电子科技集团公司智慧城市研究院）
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Low rank matrix approximation (LRMA), which aims to recover the underlying low rank matrix from its degraded observation, has a wide range of applications in computer vision. The latest LRMA methods resort to using the nuclear norm minimization (NNM) as a convex relaxation of the nonconvex rank minimization. However, NNM tends to over-shrink the rank components and treats the different rank components equally, limiting its flexibility in practical applications. We propose a more flexible model, namely the Weighted Schatten $p$-Norm Minimization (WSNM), to generalize the NNM to the Schatten $p$…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Facebook Inc.（脸书公司）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）
Conventionally, image denoising and high-level vision tasks are handled separately in computer vision. In this paper, we cope with the two jointly and explore the mutual influence between them. First we propose a convolutional neural network for image denoising which achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Second we propose a deep neural network solution that cascades two modules for image denoising and various high-level tasks, respectively, and use the joint loss for updating only the denoising network via back-propagation. We demonstrate that on one hand, the proposed denoiser has the ge…
Jilin University（吉林大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Degraded images commonly exist in the general sources of character images, leading to unsatisfactory character recognition results. Existing methods have dedicated efforts to restoring degraded character images. However, the denoising results obtained by these methods do not appear to improve character recognition performance. This is mainly because current methods only focus on pixel-level information and ignore critical features of a character, such as its glyph, resulting in character-glyph damage during the denoising process. In this paper, we introduce a novel generic framework based on g…
Center for Visual Information Technology (CVIT), IIIT-Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所视觉信息技术中心）
Fingerprint is a common biometric used for authentication and verification of an individual. These images are degraded when fingers are wet, dirty, dry or wounded and due to the failure of the sensors, etc. The extraction of the fingerprint from a degraded image requires denoising and inpainting. We propose to address these problems with an end-to-end trainable Convolutional Neural Network based architecture called FPD-M-net, by posing the fingerprint denoising and inpainting problem as a segmentation (foreground) task. Our architecture is based on the M-net with a change: structure similarity…
Image denoising and high-level vision tasks are usually handled independently in the conventional practice of computer vision, and their connection is fragile. In this paper, we cope with the two jointly and explore the mutual influence between them with the focus on two questions, namely (1) how image denoising can help improving high-level vision tasks, and (2) how the semantic information from high-level vision tasks can be used to guide image denoising. First for image denoising we propose a convolutional neural network in which convolutions are conducted in various spatial resolutions via…
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency（日本宇宙航空研究开发机构）；AdvanceSoft Corporation（AdvanceSoft公司）
Time-series data, such as unsteady pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) measurement data, may contain a significant amount of random noise. Thus, in this study, we investigated a noise-reduction method that combines multivariate singular spectrum analysis (MSSA) with low-dimensional data representation. MSSA is a state-space reconstruction technique that utilizes time-delay embedding, and the low-dimensional representation is achieved by projecting data onto the singular value decomposition (SVD) basis. The noise-reduction performance of the proposed method for unsteady PSP data, i.e., the projected…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织 Data61）
We propose to learn a fully-convolutional network model that consists of a Chain of Identity Mapping Modules (CIMM) for image denoising. The CIMM structure possesses two distinctive features that are important for the noise removal task. Firstly, each residual unit employs identity mappings as the skip connections and receives pre-activated input in order to preserve the gradient magnitude propagated in both the forward and backward directions. Secondly, by utilizing dilated kernels for the convolution layers in the residual branch, in other words within an identity mapping module, each neuron…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore
Despite the quality improvement brought by the recent methods, video super-resolution (SR) is still very challenging, especially for videos that are low-light and noisy. The current best solution is to subsequently employ best models of video SR, denoising, and illumination enhancement, but doing so often lowers the image quality, due to the inconsistency between the models. This paper presents a new parametric representation called the Deep Parametric 3D Filters (DP3DF), which incorporates local spatiotemporal information to enable simultaneous denoising, illumination enhancement, and SR effi…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown very promising results for various image restoration (IR) tasks. However, the design of network architectures remains a major challenging for achieving further improvements. While most existing DNN-based methods solve the IR problems by directly mapping low quality images to desirable high-quality images, the observation models characterizing the image degradation processes have been largely ignored. In this paper, we first propose a denoising-based IR algorithm, whose iterative steps can be computed efficiently. Then, the iterative process is unfolded in…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；National Taiwan University Hospital and College of Medicine（台湾大学医学院附设医院暨医学院）
As the rapid growth of high-speed and deep-tissue imaging in biomedical research, it is urgent to find a robust and effective denoising method to retain morphological features for further texture analysis and segmentation. Conventional denoising filters and models can easily suppress perturbative noises in high contrast images. However, for low photon budget multi-photon images, high detector gain will not only boost signals, but also bring huge background noises. In such stochastic resonance regime of imaging, sub-threshold signals may be detectable with the help of noises. Therefore, a denoi…
Compressive covariance estimation has arisen as a class of techniques whose aim is to obtain second-order statistics of stochastic processes from compressive measurements. Recently, these methods have been used in various image processing and communications applications, including denoising, spectrum sensing, and compression. Notice that estimating the covariance matrix from compressive samples leads to ill-posed minimizations with severe performance loss at high compression rates. In this regard, a regularization term is typically aggregated to the cost function to consider prior information …
A variety of deep neural network (DNN)-based image denoising methods have been proposed for use with medical images. Traditional measures of image quality (IQ) have been employed to optimize and evaluate these methods. However, the objective evaluation of IQ for the DNN-based denoising methods remains largely lacking. In this work, we evaluate the performance of DNN-based denoising methods by use of task-based IQ measures. Specifically, binary signal detection tasks under signal-known-exactly (SKE) with background-known-statistically (BKS) conditions are considered. The performance of the idea…
Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology（马林克罗特放射学研究所）
Multiple objective assessment of image-quality-based studies have reported that several deep-learning-based denoising methods show limited performance on signal-detection tasks. Our goal was to investigate the reasons for this limited performance. To achieve this goal, we conducted a task-based characterization of a DL-based denoising approach for individual signal properties. We conducted this study in the context of evaluating a DL-based approach for denoising SPECT images. The training data consisted of signals of different sizes and shapes within a clustered-lumpy background, imaged with a…
Networks with large receptive field (RF) have shown advanced fitting ability in recent years. In this work, we utilize the short-term residual learning method to improve the performance and robustness of networks for image denoising tasks. Here, we choose a multi-wavelet convolutional neural network (MWCNN), one of the state-of-art networks with large RF, as the backbone, and insert residual dense blocks (RDBs) in its each layer. We call this scheme multi-wavelet residual dense convolutional neural network (MWRDCNN). Compared with other RDB-based networks, it can extract more features of the o…
