No Arabic abstract
Many imaging technologies rely on tomographic reconstruction, which requires solving a multidimensional inverse problem given a finite number of projections. Backprojection is a popular class of algorithm for tomographic reconstruction, however it typically results in poor image reconstructions when the projection angles are sparse and/or if the sensors characteristics are not uniform. Several deep learning based algorithms have been developed to solve this inverse problem and reconstruct the image using a limited number of projections. However these algorithms typically require examples of the ground-truth (i.e. examples of reconstructed images) to yield good performance. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised sparse-view backprojection algorithm, which does not require ground-truth. The algorithm consists of two modules in a generator-projector framework; a convolutional neural network and a spatial transformer network. We evaluated our algorithm using computed tomography (CT) images of the human chest. We show that our algorithm significantly out-performs filtered backprojection when the projection angles are very sparse, as well as when the sensor characteristics vary for different angles. Our approach has practical applications for medical imaging and other imaging modalities (e.g. radar) where sparse and/or non-uniform projections may be acquired due to time or sampling constraints.
Filtered backprojection (FBP) is an efficient and popular class of tomographic image reconstruction methods. In photoacoustic tomography, these algorithms are based on theoretically exact analytic inversion formulas which results in accurate reconstructions. However, photoacoustic measurement data are often incomplete (limited detection view and sparse sampling), which results in artefacts in the images reconstructed with FBP. In addition to that, properties such as directivity of the acoustic detectors are not accounted for in standard FBP, which affects the reconstruction quality, too. To account for these issues, in this papers we propose to improve FBP algorithms based on machine learning techniques. In the proposed method, we include additional weight factors in the FBP, that are optimized on a set of incomplete data and the corresponding ground truth photoacoustic source. Numerical tests show that the learned FBP improves the reconstruction quality compared to the standard FBP.
State-of-the-art methods for Convolutional Sparse Coding usually employ Fourier-domain solvers in order to speed up the convolution operators. However, this approach is not without shortcomings. For example, Fourier-domain representations implicitly assume circular boundary conditions and make it hard to fully exploit the sparsity of the problem as well as the small spatial support of the filters. In this work, we propose a novel stochastic spatial-domain solver, in which a randomized subsampling strategy is introduced during the learning sparse codes. Afterwards, we extend the proposed strategy in conjunction with online learning, scaling the CSC model up to very large sample sizes. In both cases, we show experimentally that the proposed subsampling strategy, with a reasonable selection of the subsampling rate, outperforms the state-of-the-art frequency-domain solvers in terms of execution time without losing the learning quality. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the over-complete dictionary learned from large-scale datasets, which demonstrates an improved sparse representation of the natural images on account of more abundant learned image features.
Deep neural networks are a very powerful tool for many computer vision tasks, including image restoration, exhibiting state-of-the-art results. However, the performance of deep learning methods tends to drop once the observation model used in training mismatches the one in test time. In addition, most deep learning methods require vast amounts of training data, which are not accessible in many applications. To mitigate these disadvantages, we propose to combine two image restoration approaches: (i) Deep Image Prior (DIP), which trains a convolutional neural network (CNN) from scratch in test time using the given degraded image. It does not require any training data and builds on the implicit prior imposed by the CNN architecture; and (ii) a backprojection (BP) fidelity term, which is an alternative to the standard least squares loss that is usually used in previous DIP works. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, termed BP-DIP, on the deblurring task and show its advantages over the plain DIP, with both higher PSNR values and better inference run-time.
Deep learning-based image reconstruction methods have achieved promising results across multiple MRI applications. However, most approaches require large-scale fully-sampled ground truth data for supervised training. Acquiring fully-sampled data is often either difficult or impossible, particularly for dynamic contrast enhancement (DCE), 3D cardiac cine, and 4D flow. We present a deep learning framework for MRI reconstruction without any fully-sampled data using generative adversarial networks. We test the proposed method in two scenarios: retrospectively undersampled fast spin echo knee exams and prospectively undersampled abdominal DCE. The method recovers more anatomical structure compared to conventional methods.
In this paper, we establish a theoretical connection between the classical Lucas & Kanade (LK) algorithm and the emerging topic of Spatial Transformer Networks (STNs). STNs are of interest to the vision and learning communities due to their natural ability to combine alignment and classification within the same theoretical framework. Inspired by the Inverse Compositional (IC) variant of the LK algorithm, we present Inverse Compositional Spatial Transformer Networks (IC-STNs). We demonstrate that IC-STNs can achieve better performance than conventional STNs with less model capacity; in particular, we show superior performance in pure image alignment tasks as well as joint alignment/classification problems on real-world problems.