Learning Moiré Pattern Elimination in Both Frequency and Spatial Domains for Image Demoiréing

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Oct 30;22(21):8322. doi: 10.3390/s22218322.

Abstract

Recently, with the rapid development of mobile sensing technology, capturing scene information by mobile sensing devices in the form of images or videos has become a prevalent recording method. However, the moiré pattern phenomenon may occur when the scene contains digital screens or regular strips, which greatly degrade the visual performance and image quality. In this paper, considering the complexity and diversity of moiré patterns, we propose a novel end-to-end image demoiré method, which can learn moiré pattern elimination in both the frequency and spatial domains. To be specific, in the frequency domain, considering the signal energy of moiré pattern is widely distributed in the frequency, we introduce a wavelet transform to decompose the multi-scale image features, which can help the model identify the moiré features more precisely to suppress them effectively. On the other hand, we also design a spatial domain demoiré block (SDDB). The SDDB module can extract moiré features from the mixed features, then subtract them to obtain clean image features. The combination of the frequency domain and the spatial domain enhances the model's ability in terms of moiré feature recognition and elimination. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method to other state-of-the-art methods. The Grad-CAM results in our ablation study fully indicate the effectiveness of the two proposed blocks in our method.

Keywords: frequency domain; image demoiré; moiré patterns; wavelet transform.

Grants and funding

This research was funded by two projects of the Academy of Broadcasting Science, National Radio and Television Administration of China under projects: “Video Super-Resolution Algorithm Design and Software Development for Face Blur Problem” (JBKY20220210) and “Research on 8K UHD + Multi-Camera + Interactive Viewing Cloud Broadcasting System Technologies and Solutions for Performing Arts Scenes” (JBKY20220250).