The tradeoff between receptive field size and efficiency is a crucial issue in low level vision. Plain convolutional networks (CNNs) generally enlarge the receptive field at the expense of computational cost. Recently, dilated filtering has been adopted to address this issue. But it suffers from gridding effect, and the resulting receptive field is only a sparse sampling of input image with checkerboard patterns. In this paper, we present a novel multi-level wavelet CNN (MWCNN) model for better tradeoff between receptive field size and computational efficiency. With the modified U-Net architecture, wavelet transform is introduced to reduce the size of feature maps in the contracting subnetwork. Furthermore, another convolutional layer is further used to decrease the channels of feature maps. In the expanding subnetwork, inverse wavelet transform is then deployed to reconstruct the high resolution feature maps. Our MWCNN can also be explained as the generalization of dilated filtering and subsampling, and can be applied to many image restoration tasks. The experimental results clearly show the effectiveness of MWCNN for image denoising, single image super-resolution, and JPEG image artifacts removal.
Due to high compression rate, JPEG image usually suffers from blocking effect and results in unpleasant visual quality. @cite_0 , Dong al adopt a 4-layer ARCNN for JPEG image deblocking. By taking the degradation model of JPEG compression into account @cite_4 @cite_2 , Guo al @cite_31 suggest a dual-domain convolutional network to combine the priors in both DCT and pixel domains. GAN has also been introduced to generate more realistic result @cite_48 .
@cite_4 @cite_48 @cite_0 @cite_2 @cite_31
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We propose a highly accurate approach to remove artifacts of JPEG-compressed images. Our approach jointly learns a very deep convolutional network in both DCT and pixel domains. The dual-domain representation can make full use of DCT-domain prior knowledge of JPEG compression, which is usually lacking in traditional network-based approaches. At the same time, it can also benefit from the prowess and the efficiency of the deep feed-forward architecture, in comparison to capacity-limited sparse-coding-based approaches. Two simple strategies, i.e., Adam and residual learning, are adopted to train the very deep network and later proved to be a success. Extensive experiments demonstrate the large improvements of our approach over the state of the arts. Arguably the most common cause of image degradation is compression. This papers presents a novel approach to restoring JPEG-compressed images. The main innovation is in the approach of exploiting residual redundancies of JPEG code streams and sparsity properties of latent images. The restoration is a sparse coding process carried out jointy in the DCT and. pixel domains. The prowess of the proposed approach is directly restoring DCT coefficients of the latent image to prevent the spreading of quantization errors into the pixel domain, and at the same time using on-line machine-learnt local spatial features to regulate the solution of the underlying inverse problem. Experimental results are encouraging and show the promise of the new approach in significantly improving the quality of DCT-coded images. Blocking artifacts continue to be among the most serious defects that occur in images and video streams compressed to low bit rates using block discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based compression standards (e.g., JPEG, MPEG, and H.263). It is of interest to be able to numerically assess the degree of blocking artifact in a visual signal, for example, in order to objectively determine the efficacy of a compression method, or to discover the quality of video content being delivered by a web server. We propose new methods for efficiently assessing, and subsequently reducing, the severity of blocking artifacts in compressed image bitstreams. The method is blind, and operates only in the DCT domain. Hence, it can be applied to unknown visual signals, and it is efficient since the signal need not be compressed or decompressed. In the algorithm, blocking artifacts are modeled as 2-D step functions. A fast DCT-domain algorithm extracts all parameters needed to detect the presence of, and estimate the amplitude of blocking artifacts, by exploiting several properties of the human vision system. Using the estimate of blockiness, a novel DCT-domain method is then developed which adaptively reduces detected blocking artifacts. Our experimental results show that the proposed method of measuring blocking artifacts is effective and stable across a wide variety of images. Moreover, the proposed blocking-artifact reduction method exhibits satisfactory performance as compared to other post-processing techniques. The proposed technique has a low computational cost hence can be used for real-time image video quality monitoring and control, especially in applications where it is desired that the image video data be processed directly in the DCT-domain. Previous forensic techniques have exploited various characteristics of JPEG compression to reveal traces of manipulation in digital images. We describe a JPEG artifact that can arise depending on the choice of the mathematical operator used to convert DCT coefficients from floating-point to integer values. We show that the more commonly used floor or ceiling operators (but not the round operator) introduce a periodic artifact in the form of a single darker or brighter pixel — which we term a dimple — in 8 × 8 pixel blocks. We describe the nature of this artifact, its prevalence in commercial cameras, and how this artifact can be quantified and used to detect a wide range of digital manipulations from content-aware fill to re-sampling, airbrushing, and compositing.