Reweighted Low-Rank Matrix Analysis With Structural Smoothness for Image Denoising

Reference-Based Multi-Stage Progressive Restoration for Multi-Degraded Images

Image restoration (IR) via deep learning has been vigorously studied in recent years. However, due to the ill-posed nature of the problem, it is challenging to recover the high-quality image details from a single distorted input especially when images are corrupted by multiple distortions. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage IR approach for progressive restoration of multi-degraded images via transferring similar edges/textures from the reference image. Our method, called a Reference-based Image Restoration Transformer (Ref-IRT), operates via three main stages. In the first stage, a cascaded U-Transformer network is employed to perform the preliminary recovery of the image. The proposed network consists of two U-Transformer architectures connected by feature fusion of the encoders and decoders, and the residual image is estimated by each U-Transformer in an easy-to-hard and coarse-to-fine fashion to gradually recover the high-quality image. The second and third stages perform texture transfer from a reference image to the preliminarily-recovered target image to further enhance the restoration performance. To this end, a quality-degradation-restoration method is proposed for more accurate content/texture matching between the reference and target images, and a texture transfer/reconstruction network is employed to map the transferred features to the high-quality image. Experimental results tested on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model as compared with other state-of-the-art multi-degraded IR methods. Our code and dataset are available at https://vinelab.jp/refmdir/.

Edge-Preserved Low-Rank Representation via Multi-Level Knowledge Incorporation for Remote Sensing Image Denoising

The low-rank models have gained remarkable performance in the field of remote sensing image denoising. Nonetheless, the existing low-rank-based methods view residues as noise and simply discard them. This causes denoised results to lose many important details, especially the edges. In this paper, we propose a new denoising method named EPLRR-RSID, which focuses on edge preservation to improve the image quality of the details. Specifically, we considered the low-rank residues as a combination of useful edges and noisy components. In order to better learn the edge information from the low-rank representation (LRR), we designed multi-level knowledge to further distinguish the edge part and the noise part from the residues. Furthermore, a manifold learning framework was introduced in our proposed model to better obtain the edge information, as it can find the structural similarity of the edge part while suppressing the influence of the non-structural noise part. In this way, not only the low-rank part is better learned, but also the edge part is precisely preserved. Extensive experiments on synthetic and several real remote sensing datasets showed that EPLRR-RSID has superior advantages over the compared state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, with the mean edge protect index (MEPI) values reaching at least 0.9 and the best values in the no-reference index BRISQUE, which represents that our method improved the image quality by edge preserving.

Structural Smoothing Low-Rank Matrix Restoration Based on Sparse Coding and Dual-Weighted Model

Group sparse coding (GSC) uses the non-local similarity of images as constraints, which can fully exploit the structure and group sparse features of images. However, it only imposes the sparsity on the group coefficients, which limits the effectiveness of reconstructing real images. Low-rank regularized group sparse coding (LR-GSC) reduces this gap by imposing low-rankness on the group sparse coefficients. However, due to the use of non-local similarity, the edges and details of the images are over-smoothed, resulting in the blocking artifact of the images. In this paper, we propose a low-rank matrix restoration model based on sparse coding and dual weighting. In addition, total variation (TV) regularization is integrated into the proposed model to maintain local structure smoothness and edge features. Finally, to solve the problem of the proposed optimization, an optimization method is developed based on the alternating direction method. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed SDWLR-GSC algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for image restoration when the images have large and sparse noise, such as salt and pepper noise.

Removing Adversarial Noise via Low-Rank Completion of High-Sensitivity Points

Deep neural networks are fragile under adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose to develop a new defense method based on image restoration to remove adversarial attack noise. Using the gradient information back-propagated over the network to the input image, we identify high-sensitivity keypoints which have significant contributions to the image classification performance. We then partition the image pixels into the two groups: high-sensitivity and low-sensitivity points. For low-sensitivity pixels, we use a total variation (TV) norm-based image smoothing method to remove adversarial attack noise. For those high-sensitivity keypoints, we develop a structure-preserving low-rank image completion method. Based on matrix analysis and optimization, we derive an iterative solution for this optimization problem. Our extensive experimental results on the CIFAR-10, SVHN, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets have demonstrated that our method significantly outperforms other defense methods which are based on image de-noising or restoration, especially under powerful adversarial attacks.

A Multi-Scale Feature Extraction-Based Normalized Attention Neural Network for Image Denoising

Due to the rapid development of deep learning and artificial intelligence techniques, denoising via neural networks has drawn great attention due to their flexibility and excellent performances. However, for most convolutional network denoising methods, the convolution kernel is only one layer deep, and features of distinct scales are neglected. Moreover, in the convolution operation, all channels are treated equally; the relationships of channels are not considered. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale feature extraction-based normalized attention neural network (MFENANN) for image denoising. In MFENANN, we define a multi-scale feature extraction block to extract and combine features at distinct scales of the noisy image. In addition, we propose a normalized attention network (NAN) to learn the relationships between channels, which smooths the optimization landscape and speeds up the convergence process for training an attention model. Moreover, we introduce the NAN to convolutional network denoising, in which each channel gets gain; channels can play different roles in the subsequent convolution. To testify the effectiveness of the proposed MFENANN, we used both grayscale and color image sets whose noise levels ranged from 0 to 75 to do the experiments. The experimental results show that compared with some state-of-the-art denoising methods, the restored images of MFENANN have larger peak signal-to-noise ratios (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) values and get better overall appearance.

Hyperspectral Images Denoising via Nonconvex Regularized Low-Rank and Sparse Matrix Decomposition

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are often degraded by a mixture of various types of noise during the imaging process, including Gaussian noise, impulse noise, and stripes. Such complex noise could plague the subsequent HSIs processing. Generally, most HSI denoising methods formulate sparsity optimization problems with convex norm constraints, which over-penalize large entries of vectors, and may result in a biased solution. In this paper, a nonconvex regularized low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition (NonRLRS) method is proposed for HSI denoising, which can simultaneously remove the Gaussian noise, impulse noise, dead lines, and stripes. The NonRLRS aims to decompose the degraded HSI, expressed in a matrix form, into low-rank and sparse components with a robust formulation. To enhance the sparsity in both the intrinsic low-rank structure and the sparse corruptions, a novel nonconvex regularizer named as normalized ε -penalty, is presented, which can adaptively shrink each entry. In addition, an effective algorithm based on the majorization minimization (MM) is developed to solve the resulting nonconvex optimization problem. Specifically, the MM algorithm first substitutes the nonconvex objective function with the surrogate upper-bound in each iteration, and then minimizes the constructed surrogate function, which enables the nonconvex problem to be solved in the framework of reweighted technique. Experimental results on both simulated and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.