Deep Generalized Unfolding Networks for Image Restoration

By Chong Mou, Qian Wang, Jian Zhang. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2022

317 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved great suc-cess in image restoration. However, most DNN methods are designed as a black box, lacking transparency and inter-pretability. Although some methods are proposed to combine traditional optimization algorithms with DNN, they usually demand pre-defined degradation processes or hand-crafted assumptions, making it difficult to deal with complex and real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a Deep Generalized Unfolding Network (DGUNet) for image restoration. Concretely, without loss of interpretability, we integrate a gradient estimation strategy into the gradi-ent descent step of the Proximal Gradient Descent (PGD) algorithm, driving it to deal with complex and real-world image degradation. In addition, we design inter-stage in-formation pathways across proximal mapping in different PGD iterations to rectify the intrinsic information loss in most deep unfolding networks (DUN) through a multi-scale and spatial-adaptive way. By integrating the flexible gradi-ent descent and informative proximal mapping, we unfold the iterative PGD algorithm into a trainable DNN. Exten-sive experiments on various image restoration tasks demon-strate the superiority of our method in terms of state-of-the-art performance, interpretability, and generalizability. The source code is available at github.com/MC-E/DGUNet.

Subfields: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22755044094d1eff9d2b61bf2861649446d31bf9