Iterative deep neural networks based on proximal gradient descent for image restoration

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 4;17(11):e0276373. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276373. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

The algorithm unfolding networks with explainability of algorithms and higher efficiency of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have received considerable attention in solving ill-posed inverse problems. Under the algorithm unfolding network framework, we propose a novel end-to-end iterative deep neural network and its fast network for image restoration. The first one is designed making use of proximal gradient descent algorithm of variational models, which consists of denoiser and reconstruction sub-networks. The second one is its accelerated version with momentum factors. For sub-network of denoiser, we embed the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) in previous U-Net for adaptive feature refinement. Experiments on image denoising and deblurring demonstrate that competitive performances in quality and efficiency are gained by compared with several state-of-the-art networks for image restoration. Proposed unfolding DNN can be easily extended to solve other similar image restoration tasks, such as image super-resolution, image demosaicking, etc.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted* / methods
  • Neural Networks, Computer*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (Nos. 62172247, 61772294), the National Statistical Science Research Project (No.2020LY100), Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (No.ZR2019LZH002), Science and Technology Support Plan for Youth Innovation of Colleges and Universities of Shandong Province of China (No.2021RW018).