text: In this paper, we study design of deep neural networks for tasks of image restoration. We propose a novel style of residual connections dubbed "dual residual connection", which exploits the potential of paired operations, e.g., up- and down-sampling or convolution with large- and small-size kernels. We design a modular block implementing this connection style; it is equipped with two containers to which arbitrary paired operations are inserted. Adopting the "unraveled" view of the residual networks proposed by , we point out that a stack of the proposed modular blocks allows the first operation in a block interact with the second operation in any subsequent blocks. Specifying the two operations in each of the stacked blocks, we build a complete network for each individual task of image restoration. We experimentally evaluate the proposed approach on five image restoration tasks using nine datasets. The results show that the proposed networks with properly chosen paired operations outperform previous methods on almost all of the tasks and datasets.
  @cite_33: 
  @cite_28: The discriminative model learning for image denoising has been recently attracting considerable attentions due to its favorable denoising performance. In this paper, we take one step forward by investigating the construction of feed-forward denoising convolutional neural networks (DnCNNs) to embrace the progress in very deep architecture, learning algorithm, and regularization method into image denoising. Specifically, residual learning and batch normalization are utilized to speed up the training process as well as boost the denoising performance. Different from the existing discriminative denoising models which usually train a specific model for additive white Gaussian noise at a certain noise level, our DnCNN model is able to handle Gaussian denoising with unknown noise level (i.e., blind Gaussian denoising). With the residual learning strategy, DnCNN implicitly removes the latent clean image in the hidden layers. This property motivates us to train a single DnCNN model to tackle with several general image denoising tasks, such as Gaussian denoising, single image super-resolution, and JPEG image deblocking. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our DnCNN model can not only exhibit high effectiveness in several general image denoising tasks, but also be efficiently implemented by benefiting from GPU computing.
  @cite_57: Due to the fast inference and good performance, discriminative learning methods have been widely studied in image denoising. However, these methods mostly learn a specific model for each noise level, and require multiple models for denoising images with different noise levels. They also lack flexibility to deal with spatially variant noise, limiting their applications in practical denoising. To address these issues, we present a fast and flexible denoising convolutional neural network, namely FFDNet, with a tunable noise level map as the input. The proposed FFDNet works on downsampled sub-images, achieving a good trade-off between inference speed and denoising performance. In contrast to the existing discriminative denoisers, FFDNet enjoys several desirable properties, including: 1) the ability to handle a wide range of noise levels (i.e., [0, 75]) effectively with a single network; 2) the ability to remove spatially variant noise by specifying a non-uniform noise level map; and 3) faster speed than benchmark BM3D even on CPU without sacrificing denoising performance. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real noisy images are conducted to evaluate FFDNet in comparison with state-of-the-art denoisers. The results show that FFDNet is effective and efficient, making it highly attractive for practical denoising applications.
  @cite_24: Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been attracting considerable attention in image restoration. However, as the depth grows, the longterm dependency problem is rarely realized for these very deep models, which results in the prior states layers having little influence on the subsequent ones. Motivated by the fact that human thoughts have persistency, we propose a very deep persistent memory network (MemNet) that introduces a memory block, consisting of a recursive unit and a gate unit, to explicitly mine persistent memory through an adaptive learning process. The recursive unit learns multi-level representations of the current state under different receptive fields. The representations and the outputs from the previous memory blocks are concatenated and sent to the gate unit, which adaptively controls how much of the previous states should be reserved, and decides how much of the current state should be stored. We apply MemNet to three image restoration tasks, i.e., image denosing, super-resolution and JPEG deblocking. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the necessity of the MemNet and its unanimous superiority on all three tasks over the state of the arts. Code is available at https: github.com tyshiwo MemNet.
  @cite_45: In this paper, we propose a very deep fully convolutional encoding-decoding framework for image restoration such as denoising and super-resolution. The network is composed of multiple layers of convolution and deconvolution operators, learning end-to-end mappings from corrupted images to the original ones. The convolutional layers act as the feature extractor, which capture the abstraction of image contents while eliminating noises corruptions. Deconvolutional layers are then used to recover the image details. We propose to symmetrically link convolutional and deconvolutional layers with skip-layer connections, with which the training converges much faster and attains a higher-quality local optimum. First, the skip connections allow the signal to be back-propagated to bottom layers directly, and thus tackles the problem of gradient vanishing, making training deep networks easier and achieving restoration performance gains consequently. Second, these skip connections pass image details from convolutional layers to deconvolutional layers, which is beneficial in recovering the original image. Significantly, with the large capacity, we can handle different levels of noises using a single model. Experimental results show that our network achieves better performance than recent state-of-the-art methods.
  @cite_5: We present a novel approach to low-level vision problems that combines sparse coding and deep networks pre-trained with denoising auto-encoder (DA). We propose an alternative training scheme that successfully adapts DA, originally designed for unsupervised feature learning, to the tasks of image denoising and blind inpainting. Our method's performance in the image denoising task is comparable to that of KSVD which is a widely used sparse coding technique. More importantly, in blind image inpainting task, the proposed method provides solutions to some complex problems that have not been tackled before. Specifically, we can automatically remove complex patterns like superimposed text from an image, rather than simple patterns like pixels missing at random. Moreover, the proposed method does not need the information regarding the region that requires inpainting to be given a priori. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the tasks of image denoising and blind inpainting. We also show that our new training scheme for DA is more effective and can improve the performance of unsupervised feature learning.
  @cite_46: We present an approach to low-level vision that combines two main ideas: the use of convolutional networks as an image processing architecture and an unsupervised learning procedure that synthesizes training samples from specific noise models. We demonstrate this approach on the challenging problem of natural image denoising. Using a test set with a hundred natural images, we find that convolutional networks provide comparable and in some cases superior performance to state of the art wavelet and Markov random field (MRF) methods. Moreover, we find that a convolutional network offers similar performance in the blind de-noising setting as compared to other techniques in the non-blind setting. We also show how convolutional networks are mathematically related to MRF approaches by presenting a mean field theory for an MRF specially designed for image denoising. Although these approaches are related, convolutional networks avoid computational difficulties in MRF approaches that arise from probabilistic learning and inference. This makes it possible to learn image processing architectures that have a high degree of representational power (we train models with over 15,000 parameters), but whose computational expense is significantly less than that associated with inference in MRF approaches with even hundreds of parameters.
  @cite_10: Stacked sparse denoising autoencoders (SSDAs) have recently been shown to be successful at removing noise from corrupted images. However, like most denoising techniques, the SSDA is not robust to variation in noise types beyond what it has seen during training. To address this limitation, we present the adaptive multi-column stacked sparse denoising autoencoder (AMC-SSDA), a novel technique of combining multiple SSDAs by (1) computing optimal column weights via solving a nonlinear optimization program and (2) training a separate network to predict the optimal weights. We eliminate the need to determine the type of noise, let alone its statistics, at test time and even show that the system can be robust to noise not seen in the training set. We show that state-of-the-art denoising performance can be achieved with a single system on a variety of different noise types. Additionally, we demonstrate the efficacy of AMC-SSDA as a preprocessing (denoising) algorithm by achieving strong classification performance on corrupted MNIST digits.
summary: Gaussian noise removal Application of neural networks to noise removal has a long history @cite_46 @cite_5 @cite_10 @cite_28 @cite_57 . Mao al @cite_45 proposed REDNet, which consists of multiple convolutional and de-convolutional layers with symmetric skip connections over them. Tai al @cite_24 proposed MemNet with local memory blocks and global dense connections, showing that it performs better than REDNet. However, Suganuma al @cite_33 showed that standard convolutional autoencoders with repetitive pairs of convolutional layers with large- and small-size kernels outperform them by a good margin, which are found by architectural search based on evolutionary computation.