Image Restoration and Reconstruction using Targeted Plug-and-Play Priors
Teodoro, A. M.
;
Bioucas-Dias, J.
;
Figueiredo, M. A. T.
IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging Vol. 5, Nº 4, pp. 675 - 686, December, 2019.
ISSN (print): 2573-0436
ISSN (online): 2333-9403
Scimago Journal Ranking: 1,53 (in 2019)
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TCI.2019.2914773
Abstract
Leveraging current state-of-the-art denoisers to tackle other inverse problems in imaging is a challenging task, which has recently been the topic of significant research effort. In this paper, we present several contributions to this research front, based on two fundamental building blocks: 1) the recently proposed plug-and-play framework, which allows combining iterative algorithms for imaging inverse problems with state-of-the-art image denoisers, used in black-box fashion; and 2) patch-based denoisers, using Gaussian mixture models (GMM). We exploit the adaptability of GMM to learn class-adapted denoisers, which opens the door to embedding a patch classification step in the algorithmic loop, yielding simultaneous restoration and semantic segmentation. We apply the proposed approach to several standard imaging inverse problems (deblurring, compressive sensing reconstruction, and super-resolution), obtaining results that are competitive with the state of the art.