Demosaicing, denoising and super-resolution (SR) are of practical importance in digital image processing and have been studied independently in the passed decades. Despite the recent improvement of learning-based image processing methods in image quality, there lacks enough analysis into their interactions and characteristics under a realistic setting of the mixture problem of demosaicing, denoising and SR. In existing solutions, these tasks are simply combined to obtain a high-resolution image from a low-resolution raw mosaic image, resulting in a performance drop of the final image quality. In this paper, we first rethink the mixture problem from a holistic perspective and then propose the Trinity Enhancement Network (TENet), a specially designed learning-based method for the mixture problem, which adopts a novel image processing pipeline order and a joint learning strategy. In order to obtain the correct color sampling for training, we also contribute a new dataset namely PixelShift200, which consists of high-quality full color sampled real-world images using the advanced pixel shift technique. Experiments demonstrate that our TENet is superior to existing solutions in both quantitative and qualitative perspective. Our experiments also show the necessity of the proposed PixelShift200 dataset.
In practical applications, in addition to the above well defined problems, more common is the mixture problem of multiple image defects. For example, the mixture problem of SR and denoising @cite_49 , demosaicing and denoising @cite_26 @cite_1 @cite_28 , and the problem of SR and demosaicing @cite_8 @cite_10 @cite_37 . For the mixture problem of multiple tasks, the difficulty of solving is greatly increased. Yu @cite_3 study the order of execution of tasks in the mixture problem and use reinforcement learning to learn the order of execution of the task. More relevant to this work, Micha "el @cite_23 train a CNN to jointly perform these tasks and achieve the state of art performance. Zhang @cite_49 propose a SR network to jointly perform SR and denoising, as the denoising pre-precessing step tends to lose detail information and would deteriorate the subsequent SR performance. Zhou @cite_37 introduce deep residual network for joint demosaicking and super-resolution. However, the mixture problem of demosaicking, denoising and SR has not witnessed the usage of jointly perform strategy to the best of our knowledge.
@cite_37 @cite_26 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_49 @cite_23 @cite_10
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Demosaicking and denoising are the key first stages of the digital imaging pipeline but they are also a severely ill-posed problem that infers three color values per pixel from a single noisy measurement. Earlier methods rely on hand-crafted filters or priors and still exhibit disturbing visual artifacts in hard cases such as moire or thin edges. We introduce a new data-driven approach for these challenges: we train a deep neural network on a large corpus of images instead of using hand-tuned filters. While deep learning has shown great success, its naive application using existing training datasets does not give satisfactory results for our problem because these datasets lack hard cases. To create a better training set, we present metrics to identify difficult patches and techniques for mining community photographs for such patches. Our experiments show that this network and training procedure outperform state-of-the-art both on noisy and noise-free data. Furthermore, our algorithm is an order of magnitude faster than the previous best performing techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel coupled dictionary training method for single-image super-resolution (SR) based on patchwise sparse recovery, where the learned couple dictionaries relate the low- and high-resolution (HR) image patch spaces via sparse representation. The learning process enforces that the sparse representation of a low-resolution (LR) image patch in terms of the LR dictionary can well reconstruct its underlying HR image patch with the dictionary in the high-resolution image patch space. We model the learning problem as a bilevel optimization problem, where the optimization includes an l1-norm minimization problem in its constraints. Implicit differentiation is employed to calculate the desired gradient for stochastic gradient descent. We demonstrate that our coupled dictionary learning method can outperform the existing joint dictionary training method both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, for real applications, we speed up the algorithm approximately 10 times by learning a neural network model for fast sparse inference and selectively processing only those visually salient regions. Extensive experimental comparisons with state-of-the-art SR algorithms validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. This paper presents a comprehensive study of applying the convolutional neural network (CNN) to solving the demosaicing problem. The paper presents two CNN models that learn end-to-end mappings between the mosaic samples and the original image patches with full information. In the case the Bayer color filter array (CFA) is used, an evaluation with ten competitive methods on popular benchmarks confirms that the data-driven, automatically learned features by the CNN models are very effective. Experiments show that the proposed CNN models can perform equally well in both the sRGB space and the linear space. It is also demonstrated that the CNN model can perform joint denoising and demosaicing. The CNN model is very flexible and can be easily adopted for demosaicing with any CFA design. We train CNN models for demosaicing with three different CFAs and obtain better results than existing methods. With the great flexibility to be coupled with any CFA, we present the first data-driven joint optimization of the CFA design and the demosaicing method using CNN. Experiments show that the combination of the automatically discovered CFA pattern and the automatically devised demosaicing method significantly outperforms the current best demosaicing results. Visual comparisons confirm that the proposed methods reduce more visual artifacts than existing methods. Finally, we show that the CNN model is also effective for the more general demosaicing problem with spatially varying exposure and color and can be used for taking images of higher dynamic ranges with a single shot. The proposed models and the thorough experiments together demonstrate that CNN is an effective and versatile tool for solving the demosaicing problem. Natural image modeling plays a key role in many vision problems such as image denoising. Image priors are widely used to regularize the denoising process, which is an illposed inverse problem. One category of denoising methods exploit the priors (e.g., TV, sparsity) learned from external clean images to reconstruct the given noisy image, while another category of methods exploit the internal prior (e.g., self-similarity) to reconstruct the latent image. Though the internal prior based methods have achieved impressive denoising results, the improvement of visual quality will become very difficult with the increase of noise level. In this paper, we propose to exploit image external patch prior and internal self-similarity prior jointly, and develop an external patch prior guided internal clustering algorithm for image denoising. It is known that natural image patches form multiple subspaces. By utilizing Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) learning, image similar patches can be clustered and the subspaces can be learned. The learned GMMs from clean images are then used to guide the clustering of noisypatches of the input noisy images, followed by a low-rank approximation process to estimate the latent subspace for image recovery. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art denoising algorithms such as BM3D and WNNM.