A Modular Conditional Diffusion Framework for Image Reconstruction

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have been recently utilized to deal with various blind image restoration (IR) tasks, where they have demonstrated outstanding performance in terms of perceptual quality. However, the task-specific nature of existing solutions and the excessive computational costs related to their training, make such models impractical and challenging to use for different IR tasks than those that were initially trained for. This hinders their wider adoption, especially by those who lack access to powerful computational resources and vast amount of training data. In this work we aim to address the above issues and enable the successful adoption of DPMs in practical IR-related applications. Towards this goal, we propose a modular diffusion probabilistic IR framework (DP-IR), which allows us to combine the performance benefits of existing pre-trained state-of-the-art IR networks and generative DPMs, while it requires only the additional training of a relatively small module (0.7M params) related to the particular IR task of interest. Moreover, the architecture of the proposed framework allows for a sampling strategy that leads to at least four times reduction of neural function evaluations without suffering any performance loss, while it can also be combined with existing acceleration techniques such as DDIM. We evaluate our model on four benchmarks for the tasks of burst JDD-SR, dynamic scene deblurring, and super-resolution. Our method outperforms existing approaches in terms of perceptual quality while it retains a competitive performance with respect to fidelity metrics.

AIM 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video: Dataset, Methods and Results

This paper reviews the Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video at AIM 2022. This challenge includes two tracks. Track 1 aims at the super-resolution of compressed image, and Track~2 targets the super-resolution of compressed video. In Track 1, we use the popular dataset DIV2K as the training, validation and test sets. In Track 2, we propose the LDV 3.0 dataset, which contains 365 videos, including the LDV 2.0 dataset (335 videos) and 30 additional videos. In this challenge, there are 12 teams and 2 teams that submitted the final results to Track 1 and Track 2, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of super-resolution on compressed image and video. The proposed LDV 3.0 dataset is available at https://github.com/RenYang-home/LDV_dataset. The homepage of this challenge is at https://github.com/RenYang-home/AIM22_CompressSR.

NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Burst Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE2021 challenge on burst super-resolution. Given a RAW noisy burst as input, the task in the challenge was to generate a clean RGB image with 4 times higher resolution. The challenge contained two tracks; Track 1 evaluating on synthetically generated data, and Track 2 using real-world bursts from mobile camera. In the final testing phase, 6 teams submitted results using a diverse set of solutions. The top-performing methods set a new state-of-the-art for the burst super-resolution task.

AIM 2020 Challenge on Learned Image Signal Processing Pipeline

This paper reviews the second AIM learned ISP challenge and provides the description of the proposed solutions and results. The participating teams were solving a real-world RAW-to-RGB mapping problem, where to goal was to map the original low-quality RAW images captured by the Huawei P20 device to the same photos obtained with the Canon 5D DSLR camera. The considered task embraced a number of complex computer vision subtasks, such as image demosaicing, denoising, white balancing, color and contrast correction, demoireing, etc. The target metric used in this challenge combined fidelity scores (PSNR and SSIM) with solutions' perceptual results measured in a user study. The proposed solutions significantly improved the baseline results, defining the state-of-the-art for practical image signal processing pipeline modeling.

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real Image Denoising: Dataset, Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real image denoising with focus on the newly introduced dataset, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge is a new version of the previous NTIRE 2019 challenge on real image denoising that was based on the SIDD benchmark. This challenge is based on a newly collected validation and testing image datasets, and hence, named SIDD+. This challenge has two tracks for quantitatively evaluating image denoising performance in (1) the Bayer-pattern rawRGB and (2) the standard RGB (sRGB) color spaces. Each track ~250 registered participants. A total of 22 teams, proposing 24 methods, competed in the final phase of the challenge. The proposed methods by the participating teams represent the current state-of-the-art performance in image denoising targeting real noisy images. The newly collected SIDD+ datasets are publicly available at: https://bit.ly/siddplus_data.

Theoretical analysis on Noise2Noise using Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator for Gaussian denoising: Towards unsupervised training with clipped noisy images

Recently, Noise2Noise has been proposed for unsupervised training of deep neural networks in image restoration problems including denoising Gaussian noise. However, it does not work well for truncated noise with non-zero mean. Here, we perform theoretical analysis on Noise2Noise for the limited case of Gaussian noise removal using Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE). We extend SURE to deal with a pair of noise realizations to directly compare with Noise2Noise. Then, we show that Noise2Noise with Gaussian noise is a special case of our newly extended SURE with a pair of uncorrelated noise realizations. Lastly, we propose a compensation method for clipped Gaussian noise to approximately follow Normal distribution and show how this compensation method can be used for SURE based unsupervised denoiser training. We also show that our theoretical analysis provides insights on how to use Noise2Noise for clipped Gaussian noise.

Simultaneous compressive image recovery and deep denoiser learning from undersampled measurements

Compressive image recovery utilizes sparse image priors such as wavelet l1 norm, total-variation (TV) norm, or self-similarity to reconstruct good quality images from highly compressive samples. Recently, there have been some attempts to exploit data-driven image priors from massive amount of clean images in compressive image recovery such as LDAMP algorithm. By utilizing large-scale noiseless images for training deep neural network denoisers, LDAMP outperformed other conventional compressive image reconstruction methods. However, one drawback of LDAMP is that large-scale noiseless images must be acquired for deep learning based denoisers. In this article, we propose a method for simultaneous compressive image recovery and deep denoiser learning from undersampled measurements that enables compressive image recovery methods to use data-driven image priors when only large-scale compressive samples are available without ground truth images. By utilizing the structure of LDAMP and Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE) based deep neural network denoiser, we showed that our proposed methods were able to achieve better performance than other methods such as conventional BM3D-AMP and LDAMP methods trained with the results of BM3D-AMP for training data and/or testing data for all cases with i.i.d. Gaussian random and coded diffraction measurement matrices at various compression ratios. We also investigated accurate noise level estimation methods in LDAMP for coded diffraction measurement matrix to train deep denoiser networks for high performance.