Anatomical landmark segmentation and pathology localization are important steps in automated analysis of medical images. They are particularly challenging when the anatomy or pathology is small, as in retinal images and cardiac MRI, or when the image is of low quality due to device acquisition parameters as in magnetic resonance (MR) scanners. We propose an image super-resolution method using progressive generative adversarial networks (P-GAN) that can take as input a low-resolution image and generate a high resolution image of desired scaling factor. The super resolved images can be used for more accurate detection of landmarks and pathology. Our primary contribution is in proposing a multistage model where the output image quality of one stage is progressively improved in the next stage by using a triplet loss function. The triplet loss enables stepwise image quality improvement by using the output of the previous stage as the baseline. This facilitates generation of super resolved images of high scaling factor while maintaining good image quality. Experimental results for image super-resolution show that our proposed multistage P-GAN outperforms competing methods and baseline GAN.
Single image based SR methods downsample a given image to create a LR image and learn the mapping between the original and LR version. The learnt mapping is then applied to the original image to generate a SR image. In @cite_14 HR and LR dictionaries are learned from MRI to generate SR images. These methods depend on learning the dictionaries on external LR-HR images and assume that the test image is a representative of the training data. Since this is not always the case the results are unsatisfactory. These approaches are computationally demanding as the candidate patches have to be searched in the training dataset to find the most suitable HR candidate. Instead, compact and generative models can be learned from the training data to define the mapping between LR and HR patches.
@cite_14
2088254198 2123613719 2103824707 2011952414
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. Example learning-based image super-resolution (SR) is recognized as an effective way to produce a high-resolution (HR) image with the help of an external training set. The effectiveness of learning-based SR methods, however, depends highly upon the consistency between the supporting training set and low-resolution (LR) images to be handled. To reduce the adverse effect brought by incompatible high-frequency details in the training set, we propose a single image SR approach by learning multiscale self-similarities from an LR image itself. The proposed SR approach is based upon an observation that small patches in natural images tend to redundantly repeat themselves many times both within the same scale and across different scales. To synthesize the missing details, we establish the HR-LR patch pairs using the initial LR input and its down-sampled version to capture the similarities across different scales and utilize the neighbor embedding algorithm to estimate the relationship between the LR and HR image pairs. To fully exploit the similarities across various scales inside the input LR image, we accumulate the previous resultant images as training examples for the subsequent reconstruction processes and adopt a gradual magnification scheme to upscale the LR input to the desired size step by step. In addition, to preserve sharper edges and suppress aliasing artifacts, we further apply the nonlocal means method to learn the similarity within the same scale and formulate a nonlocal prior regularization term to well pose SR estimation under a reconstruction-based SR framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can produce compelling SR recovery both quantitatively and perceptually in comparison with other state-of-the-art baselines. In this paper, a novel method for learning based image super resolution (SR) is presented. The basic idea is to bridge the gap between a set of low resolution (LR) images and the corresponding high resolution (HR) image using both the SR reconstruction constraint and a patch based image synthesis constraint in a general probabilistic framework. We show that in this framework, the estimation of the LR image formation parameters is straightforward. The whole framework is implemented via an annealed Gibbs sampling method. Experiments on SR on both single image and image sequence input show that the proposed method provides an automatic and stable way to compute super-resolution and the achieved result is encouraging for both synthetic and real LR images. Example learning-based superresolution (SR) algorithms show promise for restoring a high-resolution (HR) image from a single low-resolution (LR) input. The most popular approaches, however, are either time- or space-intensive, which limits their practical applications in many resource-limited settings. In this paper, we propose a novel computationally efficient single image SR method that learns multiple linear mappings (MLM) to directly transform LR feature subspaces into HR subspaces. In particular, we first partition the large nonlinear feature space of LR images into a cluster of linear subspaces. Multiple LR subdictionaries are then learned, followed by inferring the corresponding HR subdictionaries based on the assumption that the LR–HR features share the same representation coefficients. We establish MLM from the input LR features to the desired HR outputs in order to achieve fast yet stable SR recovery. Furthermore, in order to suppress displeasing artifacts generated by the MLM-based method, we apply a fast nonlocal means algorithm to construct a simple yet effective similarity-based regularization term for SR enhancement. Experimental results indicate that our approach is both quantitatively and qualitatively superior to other application-oriented SR methods, while maintaining relatively low time and space complexity.