Distilling Knowledge for Designing Computational Imaging Systems

Designing the physical encoder is crucial for accurate image reconstruction in computational imaging (CI) systems. Currently, these systems are designed via end-to-end (E2E) optimization, where the encoder is modeled as a neural network layer and is jointly optimized with the decoder. However, the performance of E2E optimization is significantly reduced by the physical constraints imposed on the encoder. Also, since the E2E learns the parameters of the encoder by backpropagating the reconstruction error, it does not promote optimal intermediate outputs and suffers from gradient vanishing. To address these limitations, we reinterpret the concept of knowledge distillation (KD) for designing a physically constrained CI system by transferring the knowledge of a pretrained, less-constrained CI system. Our approach involves three steps: (1) Given the original CI system (student), a teacher system is created by relaxing the constraints on the student's encoder. (2) The teacher is optimized to solve a less-constrained version of the student's problem. (3) The teacher guides the training of the student through two proposed knowledge transfer functions, targeting both the encoder and the decoder feature space. The proposed method can be employed to any imaging modality since the relaxation scheme and the loss functions can be adapted according to the physical acquisition and the employed decoder. This approach was validated on three representative CI modalities: magnetic resonance, single-pixel, and compressive spectral imaging. Simulations show that a teacher system with an encoder that has a structure similar to that of the student encoder provides effective guidance. Our approach achieves significantly improved reconstruction performance and encoder design, outperforming both E2E optimization and traditional non-data-driven encoder designs.

Highly Constrained Coded Aperture Imaging Systems Design Via a Knowledge Distillation Approach

Computational optical imaging (COI) systems have enabled the acquisition of high-dimensional signals through optical coding elements (OCEs). OCEs encode the high-dimensional signal in one or more snapshots, which are subsequently decoded using computational algorithms. Currently, COI systems are optimized through an end-to-end (E2E) approach, where the OCEs are modeled as a layer of a neural network and the remaining layers perform a specific imaging task. However, the performance of COI systems optimized through E2E is limited by the physical constraints imposed by these systems. This paper proposes a knowledge distillation (KD) framework for the design of highly physically constrained COI systems. This approach employs the KD methodology, which consists of a teacher-student relationship, where a high-performance, unconstrained COI system (the teacher), guides the optimization of a physically constrained system (the student) characterized by a limited number of snapshots. We validate the proposed approach, using a binary coded apertures single pixel camera for monochromatic and multispectral image reconstruction. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the KD scheme over traditional E2E optimization for the designing of highly physically constrained COI systems.

GAN-supervised Seismic Data Reconstruction: An Enhanced-Learning for Improved Generalization

Seismic data interpolation plays a crucial role in subsurface imaging, enabling accurate analysis and interpretation throughout the seismic processing workflow. Despite the widespread exploration of deep supervised learning methods for seismic data reconstruction, several challenges still remain open. Particularly, the requirement of extensive training data and poor domain generalization due to the seismic survey's variability poses significant issues. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a deep-learning-based seismic data reconstruction approach that leverages data redundancy. This method involves a two-stage training process. First, an adversarial generative network (GAN) is trained using synthetic seismic data, enabling the extraction and learning of their primary and local seismic characteristics. Second, a reconstruction network is trained with synthetic data generated by the GAN, which dynamically adjusts the noise and distortion level at each epoch to promote feature diversity. This approach enhances the generalization capabilities of the reconstruction network by allowing control over the generation of seismic patterns from the latent space of the GAN, thereby reducing the dependency on large seismic databases. Experimental results on field and synthetic seismic datasets both pre-stack and post-stack show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline supervised learning and unsupervised approaches such as deep seismic prior and internal learning, by up to 8 dB of PSNR.