New York University（纽约大学）；Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Tandon School of Engineering（坦登工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电子与计算机工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering（电气与系统工程系）
Abdullah H. Al-Shabili, Xiaojian Xu, Ivan Selesnick, Ulugbek S. Kamilov
The past few years have seen a surge of activity around integration of deep learning networks and optimization algorithms for solving inverse problems. Recent work on plug-and-play priors (PnP), regularization by denoising (RED), and deep unfolding has shown the state-of-the-art performance of such integration in a variety of applications. However, the current paradigm for designing such algorithms is inherently Euclidean, due to the usage of the quadratic norm within the projection and proximal operators. We propose to broaden this perspective by considering a non-Euclidean setting based on the more general Bregman distance. Our new Bregman Proximal Gradient Method variant of PnP (PnP-BPGM) and Bregman Steepest Descent variant of RED (RED-BSD) replace the traditional updates in PnP and RED from the quadratic norms to more general Bregman distance. We present a theoretical convergence result for PnP-BPGM and demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms on Poisson linear inverse problems.
The Plug-and-Play (PnP) framework makes it possible to integrate advanced image denoising priors into optimization algorithms, to efficiently solve a variety of image restoration tasks generally formulated as Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation problems. The Plug-and-Play alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and the Regularization by Denoising (RED) algorithms are two examples of such methods that made a breakthrough in image restoration. However, while the former method only applies to proximal algorithms, it has recently been shown that there exists no regularization that exp…
Deep-learning-based hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration methods have gained great popularity for their remarkable performance but often demand expensive network retraining whenever the specifics of task changes. In this paper, we propose to restore HSIs in a unified approach with an effective plug-and-play method, which can jointly retain the flexibility of optimization-based methods and utilize the powerful representation capability of deep neural networks. Specifically, we first develop a new deep HSI denoiser leveraging gated recurrent convolution units, short- and long-term skip connecti…
We introduce a novel energy formulation for Plug- and-Play (PnP) image recovery. Traditional PnP methods that use a convolutional neural network (CNN) do not have an energy based formulation. The primary focus of this work is to introduce an energy-based PnP formulation, which relies on a CNN that learns the log of the image prior from training data. The score function is evaluated as the gradient of the energy model, which resembles a UNET with shared encoder and decoder weights. The proposed score function is thus constrained to a conservative vector field, which is the key difference with c…
Plug-and-Play optimization recently emerged as a powerful technique for solving inverse problems by plugging a denoiser into a classical optimization algorithm. The denoiser accounts for the regularization and therefore implicitly determines the prior knowledge on the data, hence replacing typical handcrafted priors. In this paper, we extend the concept of plug-and-play optimization to use denoisers that can be parameterized for non-constant noise variance. In that aim, we introduce a preconditioning of the ADMM algorithm, which mathematically justifies the use of such an adjustable denoiser. …
Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM)（瑞士电子与微技术中心（CSEM））；School of Computer and Communication Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL）计算机与通信科学学院）
Plug-and-play denoisers can be used to perform generic image restoration tasks independent of the degradation type. These methods build on the fact that the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) optimization can be solved using smaller sub-problems, including a MAP denoising optimization. We present the first end-to-end approach to MAP estimation for image denoising using deep neural networks. We show that our method is guaranteed to minimize the MAP denoising objective, which is then used in an optimization algorithm for generic image restoration. We provide theoretical analysis of our approach and show…
This paper presents a novel deformable registration framework, leveraging an image prior specified through a denoising function, for severely noise-corrupted placental images. Recent work on plug-and-play (PnP) priors has shown the state-of-the-art performance of reconstruction algorithms under such priors in a range of imaging applications. Integration of powerful image denoisers into advanced registration methods provides our model with a flexibility to accommodate datasets that have low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We demonstrate the performance of our method under a wide variety of denoi…
Recent work has shown the effectiveness of the plug-and-play priors (PnP) framework for regularized image reconstruction. However, the performance of PnP depends on the quality of the denoisers used as priors. In this letter, we design a novel PnP denoising prior, called multiple self-similarity net (MSSN), based on the recurrent neural network (RNN) with self-similarity matching using multi-head attention mechanism. Unlike traditional neural net denoisers, MSSN exploits different types of relationships among non-local and repeating features to remove the noise in the input image. We numerical…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Recent works on plug-and-play image restoration have shown that a denoiser can implicitly serve as the image prior for model-based methods to solve many inverse problems. Such a property induces considerable advantages for plug-and-play image restoration (e.g., integrating the flexibility of model-based method and effectiveness of learning-based methods) when the denoiser is discriminatively learned via deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with large modeling capacity. However, while deeper and larger CNN models are rapidly gaining popularity, existing plug-and-play image restoration hinder…
Plug-and-Play Priors (PnP) is one of the most widely-used frameworks for solving computational imaging problems through the integration of physical models and learned models. PnP leverages high-fidelity physical sensor models and powerful machine learning methods for prior modeling of data to provide state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms. PnP algorithms alternate between minimizing a data-fidelity term to promote data consistency and imposing a learned regularizer in the form of an image denoiser. Recent highly-successful applications of PnP algorithms include bio-microscopy, computerized…
Plug-and-Play methods constitute a class of iterative algorithms for imaging problems where regularization is performed by an off-the-shelf denoiser. Although Plug-and-Play methods can lead to tremendous visual performance for various image problems, the few existing convergence guarantees are based on unrealistic (or suboptimal) hypotheses on the denoiser, or limited to strongly convex data terms. In this work, we propose a new type of Plug-and-Play methods, based on half-quadratic splitting, for which the denoiser is realized as a gradient descent step on a functional parameterized by a deep…
This paper introduces a new Plug-and-Play (PnP) alternating direction of multipliers (ADMM) scheme based on a recently proposed denoiser using the Schroedinger equation's solutions of quantum physics. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is evaluated for Poisson image deconvolution, which is very common for imaging applications, such as, for example, limited photon acquisition. Numerical results show the superiority of the proposed scheme compared to recent state-of-the-art techniques, for both low and high signal-to-noise-ratio scenarios. This performance gain is mostly explained by the f…
Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）
The plug-and-play priors (PnP) and regularization by denoising (RED) methods have become widely used for solving inverse problems by leveraging pre-trained deep denoisers as image priors. While the empirical imaging performance and the theoretical convergence properties of these algorithms have been widely investigated, their recovery properties have not previously been theoretically analyzed. We address this gap by showing how to establish theoretical recovery guarantees for PnP/RED by assuming that the solution of these methods lies near the fixed-points of a deep neural network. We also pre…
Due to the development of deep learning-based denoisers, the plug-and-play strategy has achieved great success in image restoration problems. However, existing plug-and-play image restoration methods are designed for non-blind Gaussian denoising such as zhang et al (2022), the performance of which visibly deteriorate for unknown noises. To push the limits of plug-and-play image restoration, we propose a novel framework with blind Gaussian prior, which can deal with more complicated image restoration problems in the real world. More specifically, we build up a new image restoration model by reg…
Plug-and-play priors (PnP) is a methodology for regularized image reconstruction that specifies the prior through an image denoiser. While PnP algorithms are well understood for denoisers performing maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation, they have not been analyzed for the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) denoisers. This letter addresses this gap by establishing the first theoretical convergence result for the iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm (ISTA) variant of PnP for MMSE denoisers. We show that the iterates produced by PnP-ISTA with an MMSE denoiser converge to a stati…
We propose a generative framework which takes on the video frame interpolation problem. Our framework, which we call Deep Locally Linear Embedding (DeepLLE), is powered by a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) while it can be used instantly like conventional models. DeepLLE fits an auto-encoding CNN to a set of several consecutive frames and embeds a linearity constraint on the latent codes so that new frames can be generated by interpolating new latent codes. Different from the current deep learning paradigm which requires training on large datasets, DeepLLE works in a plug-and-play and u…
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
The Retinex model is one of the most representative and effective methods for low-light image enhancement. However, the Retinex model does not explicitly tackle the noise problem, and shows unsatisfactory enhancing results. In recent years, due to the excellent performance, deep learning models have been widely used in low-light image enhancement. However, these methods have two limitations: i) The desirable performance can only be achieved by deep learning when a large number of labeled data are available. However, it is not easy to curate massive low/normal-light paired data; ii) Deep learni…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）
Plug-and-play (PnP) is a non-convex framework that integrates modern denoising priors, such as BM3D or deep learning-based denoisers, into ADMM or other proximal algorithms. An advantage of PnP is that one can use pre-trained denoisers when there is not sufficient data for end-to-end training. Although PnP has been recently studied extensively with great empirical success, theoretical analysis addressing even the most basic question of convergence has been insufficient. In this paper, we theoretically establish convergence of PnP-FBS and PnP-ADMM, without using diminishing stepsizes, under a c…
Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）
Plug-and-play priors (PnP) is a powerful framework for regularizing imaging inverse problems by using advanced denoisers within an iterative algorithm. Recent experimental evidence suggests that PnP algorithms achieve state-of-the-art performance in a range of imaging applications. In this paper, we introduce a new online PnP algorithm based on the iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm (ISTA). The proposed algorithm uses only a subset of measurements at every iteration, which makes it scalable to very large datasets. We present a new theoretical convergence analysis, for both batch and on…
In this work we propose a new paradigm for designing fast plug-and-play (PnP) algorithms using dimensionality reduction techniques. Unlike existing approaches which utilize stochastic gradient iterations for acceleration, we propose novel multi-stage sketched gradient iterations which first perform downsampling dimensionality reduction in the image space, and then efficiently approximate the true gradient using the sketched gradient in the low-dimensional space. This sketched gradient scheme can also be naturally combined with PnP-SGD methods for further improvement on computational complexity…
National Tsin Hua University（国立清华大学）；NEC Labs America（NEC美国实验室）；National Chiao Tung University（国立交通大学）
We propose a novel plug-and-play (PnP) module for improving depth prediction with taking arbitrary patterns of sparse depths as input. Given any pre-trained depth prediction model, our PnP module updates the intermediate feature map such that the model outputs new depths consistent with the given sparse depths. Our method requires no additional training and can be applied to practical applications such as leveraging both RGB and sparse LiDAR points to robustly estimate dense depth map. Our approach achieves consistent improvements on various state-of-the-art methods on indoor (i.e., NYU-v2) an…
A plug-and-play synthetic data deep learning for undersampled magnetic resonance image reconstruction
Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University（厦门大学人工智能学院）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Department of Electronic Science, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Plasma and Magnetic Resonance, Xiamen University（厦门大学电子科学系）；Department of Microelectronics and Integrated Circuit, Xiamen University（厦门大学微电子与集成电路系）
The Plug-and-Play (PnP) ADMM algorithm is a powerful image restoration framework that allows advanced image denoising priors to be integrated into physical forward models to generate high quality image restoration results. However, despite the enormous number of applications and several theoretical studies trying to prove the convergence by leveraging tools in convex analysis, very little is known about why the algorithm is doing so well. The goal of this paper is to fill the gap by discussing the performance of PnP ADMM. By restricting the denoisers to the class of graph filters under a linea…
Plug-and-play (PnP) method is a recent paradigm for image regularization, where the proximal operator (associated with some given regularizer) in an iterative algorithm is replaced with a powerful denoiser. Algorithmically, this involves repeated inversion (of the forward model) and denoising until convergence. Remarkably, PnP regularization produces promising results for several restoration applications. However, a fundamental question in this regard is the theoretical convergence of the PnP iterations, since the algorithm is not strictly derived from an optimization framework. This question …
Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）
Fast data acquisition in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is vastly in demand and scan time directly depends on the number of acquired k-space samples. Conventional MRI reconstruction methods for fast MRI acquisition mostly relied on different regularizers which represent analytical models of sparsity. However, recent data-driven methods based on deep learning has resulted in promising improvements in image reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we propose a deep plug-and-play prior framework for parallel MRI reconstruction problems which utilize a deep neural network (DNN) as an advanced d…
The Plug-and-Play (PnP) framework was recently introduced for low-dose CT reconstruction to leverage the interpretability and the flexibility of model-based methods to incorporate various plugins, such as trained deep learning (DL) neural networks. However, the benefits of PnP vs. state-of-the-art DL methods have not been clearly demonstrated. In this work, we proposed an improved PnP framework to address the previous limitations and develop clinical-relevant segmentation metrics for quantitative result assessment. Compared with the DL alone methods, our proposed PnP framework was slightly inf…
