No Arabic abstract
Image restoration is a long-standing low-level vision problem that aims to restore high-quality images from low-quality images (e.g., downscaled, noisy and compressed images). While state-of-the-art image restoration methods are based on convolutional neural networks, few attempts have been made with Transformers which show impressive performance on high-level vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a strong baseline model SwinIR for image restoration based on the Swin Transformer. SwinIR consists of three parts: shallow feature extraction, deep feature extraction and high-quality image reconstruction. In particular, the deep feature extraction module is composed of several residual Swin Transformer blocks (RSTB), each of which has several Swin Transformer layers together with a residual connection. We conduct experiments on three representative tasks: image super-resolution (including classical, lightweight and real-world image super-resolution), image denoising (including grayscale and color image denoising) and JPEG compression artifact reduction. Experimental results demonstrate that SwinIR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on different tasks by $textbf{up to 0.14$sim$0.45dB}$, while the total number of parameters can be reduced by $textbf{up to 67%}$.
In the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved milestones in medical image analysis. Especially, the deep neural networks based on U-shaped architecture and skip-connections have been widely applied in a variety of medical image tasks. However, although CNN has achieved excellent performance, it cannot learn global and long-range semantic information interaction well due to the locality of the convolution operation. In this paper, we propose Swin-Unet, which is an Unet-like pure Transformer for medical image segmentation. The tokenized image patches are fed into the Transformer-based U-shaped Encoder-Decoder architecture with skip-connections for local-global semantic feature learning. Specifically, we use hierarchical Swin Transformer with shifted windows as the encoder to extract context features. And a symmetric Swin Transformer-based decoder with patch expanding layer is designed to perform the up-sampling operation to restore the spatial resolution of the feature maps. Under the direct down-sampling and up-sampling of the inputs and outputs by 4x, experiments on multi-organ and cardiac segmentation tasks demonstrate that the pure Transformer-based U-shaped Encoder-Decoder network outperforms those methods with full-convolution or the combination of transformer and convolution. The codes and trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/HuCaoFighting/Swin-Unet.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success in image restoration tasks by directly learning a powerful non-linear mapping from corrupted images to their latent clean ones. However, there still exist two major limitations for these deep learning (DL)-based methods. Firstly, the noises contained in real corrupted images are very complex, usually neglected and largely under-estimated in most current methods. Secondly, existing DL methods are mostly trained on one pre-assumed degradation process for all of the training image pairs, such as the widely used bicubic downsampling assumption in the image super-resolution task, inevitably leading to poor generalization performance when the true degradation does not match with such assumed one. To address these issues, we propose a unified generative model for the image restoration, which elaborately configures the degradation process from the latent clean image to the observed corrupted one. Specifically, different from most of current methods, the pixel-wisely non-i.i.d. Gaussian distribution, being with more flexibility, is adopted in our method to fit the complex real noises. Furthermore, the method is built on the general image degradation process, making it capable of adapting diverse degradations under one single model. Besides, we design a variational inference algorithm to learn all parameters involved in the proposed model with explicit form of objective loss. Specifically, beyond traditional variational methodology, two DNNs are employed to parameterize the posteriori distributions, one to infer the distribution of the latent clean image, and another to infer the distribution of the image noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method on three classical image restoration tasks, including image denoising, image super-resolution and JPEG image deblocking.
Image restoration has seen great progress in the last years thanks to the advances in deep neural networks. Most of these existing techniques are trained using full supervision with suitable image pairs to tackle a specific degradation. However, in a blind setting with unknown degradations this is not possible and a good prior remains crucial. Recently, neural network based approaches have been proposed to model such priors by leveraging either denoising autoencoders or the implicit regularization captured by the neural network structure itself. In contrast to this, we propose using normalizing flows to model the distribution of the target content and to use this as a prior in a maximum a posteriori (MAP) formulation. By expressing the MAP optimization process in the latent space through the learned bijective mapping, we are able to obtain solutions through gradient descent. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explores normalizing flows as prior in image enhancement problems. Furthermore, we present experimental results for a number of different degradations on data sets varying in complexity and show competitive results when comparing with the deep image prior approach.
Microscopy is a powerful visualization tool in biology, enabling the study of cells, tissues, and the fundamental biological processes; yet, the observed images typically suffer from blur and background noise. In this work, we propose a unifying framework of algorithms for Gaussian image deblurring and denoising. These algorithms are based on deep learning techniques for the design of learnable regularizers integrated into the Wiener-Kolmogorov filter. Our extensive experimentation line showcases that the proposed approach achieves a superior quality of image reconstruction and surpasses the solutions that rely either on deep learning or on optimization schemes alone. Augmented with the variance stabilizing transformation, the proposed reconstruction pipeline can also be successfully applied to the problem of Poisson image deblurring, surpassing the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, several variants of the proposed framework demonstrate competitive performance at low computational complexity, which is of high importance for real-time imaging applications.
The availability of large-scale datasets has helped unleash the true potential of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, for the single-image denoising problem, capturing a real dataset is an unacceptably expensive and cumbersome procedure. Consequently, image denoising algorithms are mostly developed and evaluated on synthetic data that is usually generated with a widespread assumption of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). While the CNNs achieve impressive results on these synthetic datasets, they do not perform well when applied on real camera images, as reported in recent benchmark datasets. This is mainly because the AWGN is not adequate for modeling the real camera noise which is signal-dependent and heavily transformed by the camera imaging pipeline. In this paper, we present a framework that models camera imaging pipeline in forward and reverse directions. It allows us to produce any number of realistic image pairs for denoising both in RAW and sRGB spaces. By training a new image denoising network on realistic synthetic data, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on real camera benchmark datasets. The parameters in our model are ~5 times lesser than the previous best method for RAW denoising. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed framework generalizes beyond image denoising problem e.g., for color matching in stereoscopic cinema. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/CycleISP.