No Arabic abstract
Filtering images of more than one channel is challenging in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. By grouping similar patches to utilize the self-similarity and sparse linear approximation of natural images, recent nonlocal and transform-domain methods have been widely used in color and multispectral image (MSI) denoising. Many related methods focus on the modeling of group level correlation to enhance sparsity, which often resorts to a recursive strategy with a large number of similar patches. The importance of the patch level representation is understated. In this paper, we mainly investigate the influence and potential of representation at patch level by considering a general formulation with block diagonal matrix. We further show that by training a proper global patch basis, along with a local principal component analysis transform in the grouping dimension, a simple transform-threshold-inverse method could produce very competitive results. Fast implementation is also developed to reduce computational complexity. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real datasets demonstrate its robustness, effectiveness and efficiency.
Filtering real-world color images is challenging due to the complexity of noise that can not be formulated as a certain distribution. However, the rapid development of camera lens pos- es greater demands on image denoising in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Currently, the most widely accepted framework employs the combination of transform domain techniques and nonlocal similarity characteristics of natural images. Based on this framework, many competitive methods model the correlation of R, G, B channels with pre-defined or adaptively learned transforms. In this chapter, a brief review of related methods and publicly available datasets is presented, moreover, a new dataset that includes more natural outdoor scenes is introduced. Extensive experiments are performed and discussion on visual effect enhancement is included.
Modern digital cameras rely on the sequential execution of separate image processing steps to produce realistic images. The first two steps are usually related to denoising and demosaicking where the former aims to reduce noise from the sensor and the latter converts a series of light intensity readings to color images. Modern approaches try to jointly solve these problems, i.e. joint denoising-demosaicking which is an inherently ill-posed problem given that two-thirds of the intensity information is missing and the rest are perturbed by noise. While there are several machine learning systems that have been recently introduced to solve this problem, the majority of them relies on generic network architectures which do not explicitly take into account the physical image model. In this work we propose a novel algorithm which is inspired by powerful classical image regularization methods, large-scale optimization, and deep learning techniques. Consequently, our derived iterative optimization algorithm, which involves a trainable denoising network, has a transparent and clear interpretation compared to other black-box data driven approaches. Our extensive experimentation line demonstrates that our proposed method outperforms any previous approaches for both noisy and noise-free data across many different datasets. This improvement in reconstruction quality is attributed to the rigorous derivation of an iterative solution and the principled way we design our denoising network architecture, which as a result requires fewer trainable parameters than the current state-of-the-art solution and furthermore can be efficiently trained by using a significantly smaller number of training data than existing deep demosaicking networks. Code and results can be found at https://github.com/cig-skoltech/deep_demosaick
Compared to color images captured by conventional RGB cameras, monochrome images usually have better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and richer textures due to its higher quantum efficiency. It is thus natural to apply a mono-color dual-camera system to restore color images with higher visual quality. In this paper, we propose a mono-color image enhancement algorithm that colorizes the monochrome image with the color one. Based on the assumption that adjacent structures with similar luminance values are likely to have similar colors, we first perform dense scribbling to assign colors to the monochrome pixels through block matching. Two types of outliers, including occlusion and color ambiguity, are detected and removed from the initial scribbles. We also introduce a sampling strategy to accelerate the scribbling process. Then, the dense scribbles are propagated to the entire image. To alleviate incorrect color propagation in the regions that have no color hints at all, we generate extra color seeds based on the existed scribbles to guide the propagation process. Experimental results show that, our algorithm can efficiently restore color images with higher SNR and richer details from the mono-color image pairs, and achieves good performance in solving the color bleeding problem.
Nonlocal image representation or group sparsity has attracted considerable interest in various low-level vision tasks and has led to several state-of-the-art image denoising techniques, such as BM3D, LSSC. In the past, convex optimization with sparsity-promoting convex regularization was usually regarded as a standard scheme for estimating sparse signals in noise. However, using convex regularization can not still obtain the correct sparsity solution under some practical problems including image inverse problems. In this paper we propose a non-convex weighted $ell_p$ minimization based group sparse representation (GSR) framework for image denoising. To make the proposed scheme tractable and robust, the generalized soft-thresholding (GST) algorithm is adopted to solve the non-convex $ell_p$ minimization problem. In addition, to improve the accuracy of the nonlocal similar patches selection, an adaptive patch search (APS) scheme is proposed. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed approach not only outperforms many state-of-the-art denoising methods such as BM3D and WNNM, but also results in a competitive speed.
In this paper, we present a fast exemplar-based image colorization approach using color embeddings named Color2Embed. Generally, due to the difficulty of obtaining input and ground truth image pairs, it is hard to train a exemplar-based colorization model with unsupervised and unpaired training manner. Current algorithms usually strive to achieve two procedures: i) retrieving a large number of reference images with high similarity for preparing training dataset, which is inevitably time-consuming and tedious; ii) designing complicated modules to transfer the colors of the reference image to the target image, by calculating and leveraging the deep semantic correspondence between them (e.g., non-local operation), which is computationally expensive during testing. Contrary to the previous methods, we adopt a self-augmented self-reference learning scheme, where the reference image is generated by graphical transformations from the original colorful one whereby the training can be formulated in a paired manner. Second, in order to reduce the process time, our method explicitly extracts the color embeddings and exploits a progressive style feature Transformation network, which injects the color embeddings into the reconstruction of the final image. Such design is much more lightweight and intelligible, achieving appealing performance with fast processing speed.