Allard A. Hendriksen

Richard Schoonhoven, Allard A. Hendriksen, Daniël M. Pelt et al.

Neural network pruning techniques can substantially reduce the computational cost of applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Common pruning methods determine which convolutional filters to remove by ranking the filters individually, i.e., without taking into account their interdependence. In this paper, we advocate the viewpoint that pruning should consider the interdependence between series of consecutive operators. We propose the LongEst-chAiN (LEAN) method that prunes CNNs by using graph-based algorithms to select relevant chains of convolutions. A CNN is interpreted as a graph, with the operator norm of each operator as distance metric for the edges. LEAN pruning iteratively extracts the highest value path from the graph to keep. In our experiments, we test LEAN pruning on several image-to-image tasks, including the well-known CamVid dataset, and a real-world X-ray CT dataset. Results indicate that LEAN pruning can result in networks with similar accuracy, while using 1.7-12x fewer convolutional filters than existing approaches.

Marinus J. Lagerwerf, Allard A. Hendriksen, Jan-Willem Buurlage et al.

At X-ray beamlines of synchrotron light sources, the achievable time-resolution for 3D tomographic imaging of the interior of an object has been reduced to a fraction of a second, enabling rapidly changing structures to be examined. The associated data acquisition rates require sizable computational resources for reconstruction. Therefore, full 3D reconstruction of the object is usually performed after the scan has completed. Quasi-3D reconstruction -- where several interactive 2D slices are computed instead of a 3D volume -- has been shown to be significantly more efficient, and can enable the real-time reconstruction and visualization of the interior. However, quasi-3D reconstruction relies on filtered backprojection type algorithms, which are typically sensitive to measurement noise. To overcome this issue, we propose Noise2Filter, a learned filter method that can be trained using only the measured data, and does not require any additional training data. This method combines quasi-3D reconstruction, learned filters, and self-supervised learning to derive a tomographic reconstruction method that can be trained in under a minute and evaluated in real-time. We show limited loss of accuracy compared to training with additional training data, and improved accuracy compared to standard filter-based methods.

Allard A. Hendriksen, Daniel M. Pelt, K. Joost Batenburg

Recovering a high-quality image from noisy indirect measurements is an important problem with many applications. For such inverse problems, supervised deep convolutional neural network (CNN)-based denoising methods have shown strong results, but the success of these supervised methods critically depends on the availability of a high-quality training dataset of similar measurements. For image denoising, methods are available that enable training without a separate training dataset by assuming that the noise in two different pixels is uncorrelated. However, this assumption does not hold for inverse problems, resulting in artifacts in the denoised images produced by existing methods. Here, we propose Noise2Inverse, a deep CNN-based denoising method for linear image reconstruction algorithms that does not require any additional clean or noisy data. Training a CNN-based denoiser is enabled by exploiting the noise model to compute multiple statistically independent reconstructions. We develop a theoretical framework which shows that such training indeed obtains a denoising CNN, assuming the measured noise is element-wise independent and zero-mean. On simulated CT datasets, Noise2Inverse demonstrates an improvement in peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index compared to state-of-the-art image denoising methods and conventional reconstruction methods, such as Total-Variation Minimization. We also demonstrate that the method is able to significantly reduce noise in challenging real-world experimental datasets.