No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we propose a regularization technique for noisy-image super-resolution and image denoising. Total variation (TV) regularization is adopted in many image processing applications to preserve the local smoothness. However, TV prior is prone to oversmoothness, staircasing effect, and contrast losses. Nonlocal TV (NLTV) mitigates the contrast losses by adaptively weighting the smoothness based on the similarity measure of image patches. Although it suppresses the noise effectively in the flat regions, it might leave residual noise surrounding the edges especially when the image is not oversmoothed. To address this problem, we propose the bilateral spectrum weighted total variation (BSWTV). Specially, we apply a locally adaptive shrink coefficient to the image gradients and employ the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the weighted image gradients to effectively refine the weighting map and suppress the residual noise. In conjunction with the data fidelity term derived from a mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise model, the objective function is decomposed and solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. In order to remove outliers and facilitate the convergence stability, the weighting map is smoothed by a Gaussian filter with an iteratively decreased kernel width and updated in a momentum-based manner in each ADMM iteration. We benchmark our method with the state-of-the-art approaches on the public real-world datasets for super-resolution and image denoising. Experiments show that the proposed method obtains outstanding performance for super-resolution and achieves promising results for denoising on real-world images.
Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising aims to restore clean HSI from the noise-contaminated one. Noise contamination can often be caused during data acquisition and conversion. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-spectral total variation (SSTV) regularized nonconvex local low-rank (LR) tensor approximation method to remove mixed noise in HSIs. From one aspect, the clean HSI data have its underlying local LR tensor property, even though the real HSI data may not be globally low-rank due to out-liers and non-Gaussian noise. According to this fact, we propose a novel tensor $L_{gamma}$-norm to formulate the local LR prior. From another aspect, HSIs are assumed to be piecewisely smooth in the global spatial and spectral domains. Instead of traditional bandwise total variation, we use the SSTV regularization to simultaneously consider global spatial structure and spectral correlation of neighboring bands. Results on simulated and real HSI datasets indicate that the use of local LR tensor penalty and global SSTV can boost the preserving of local details and overall structural information in HSIs.
Low-rankness is important in the hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising tasks. The tensor nuclear norm (TNN), defined based on the tensor singular value decomposition, is a state-of-the-art method to describe the low-rankness of HSI. However, TNN ignores some of the physical meanings of HSI in tackling the denoising tasks, leading to suboptimal denoising performance. In this paper, we propose the multi-modal and frequency-weighted tensor nuclear norm (MFWTNN) and the non-convex MFWTNN for HSI denoising tasks. Firstly, we investigate the physical meaning of frequency components and reconsider their weights to improve the low-rank representation ability of TNN. Meanwhile, we also consider the correlation among two spatial dimensions and the spectral dimension of HSI and combine the above improvements to TNN to propose MFWTNN. Secondly, we use non-convex functions to approximate the rank function of the frequency tensor and propose the NonMFWTNN to relax the MFWTNN better. Besides, we adaptively choose bigger weights for slices mainly containing noise information and smaller weights for slices containing profile information. Finally, we develop the efficient alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) based algorithm to solve the proposed models, and the effectiveness of our models are substantiated in simulated and real HSI datasets.
We introduce a simple and efficient lossless image compression algorithm. We store a low resolution version of an image as raw pixels, followed by several iterations of lossless super-resolution. For lossless super-resolution, we predict the probability of a high-resolution image, conditioned on the low-resolution input, and use entropy coding to compress this super-resolution operator. Super-Resolution based Compression (SReC) is able to achieve state-of-the-art compression rates with practical runtimes on large datasets. Code is available online at https://github.com/caoscott/SReC.
We present SR3, an approach to image Super-Resolution via Repeated Refinement. SR3 adapts denoising diffusion probabilistic models to conditional image generation and performs super-resolution through a stochastic denoising process. Inference starts with pure Gaussian noise and iteratively refines the noisy output using a U-Net model trained on denoising at various noise levels. SR3 exhibits strong performance on super-resolution tasks at different magnification factors, on faces and natural images. We conduct human evaluation on a standard 8X face super-resolution task on CelebA-HQ, comparing with SOTA GAN methods. SR3 achieves a fool rate close to 50%, suggesting photo-realistic outputs, while GANs do not exceed a fool rate of 34%. We further show the effectiveness of SR3 in cascaded image generation, where generative models are chained with super-resolution models, yielding a competitive FID score of 11.3 on ImageNet.
It has become a standard practice to use the convolutional networks (ConvNet) with RELU non-linearity in image restoration and super-resolution (SR). Although the universal approximation theorem states that a multi-layer neural network can approximate any non-linear function with the desired precision, it does not reveal the best network architecture to do so. Recently, operational neural networks (ONNs) that choose the best non-linearity from a set of alternatives, and their self-organized variants (Self-ONN) that approximate any non-linearity via Taylor series have been proposed to address the well-known limitations and drawbacks of conventional ConvNets such as network homogeneity using only the McCulloch-Pitts neuron model. In this paper, we propose the concept of self-organized operational residual (SOR) blocks, and present hybrid network architectures combining regular residual and SOR blocks to strike a balance between the benefits of stronger non-linearity and the overall number of parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the~proposed architectures yield performance improvements in both PSNR and perceptual metrics.