Jean-Luc Starck

Tobias Liaudat, Jean-Luc Starck, Martin Kilbinger et al.

In astronomy, upcoming space telescopes with wide-field optical instruments have a spatially varying point spread function (PSF). Specific scientific goals require a high-fidelity estimation of the PSF at target positions where no direct measurement of the PSF is provided. Even though observations of the PSF are available at some positions of the field of view (FOV), they are undersampled, noisy, and integrated into wavelength in the instrument's passband. PSF modeling represents a challenging ill-posed problem, as it requires building a model from degraded observations that can infer a super-resolved PSF at any wavelength and position in the FOV. Our model, coined WaveDiff, proposes a paradigm shift in the data-driven modeling of the point spread function field of telescopes. We change the data-driven modeling space from the pixels to the wavefront by adding a differentiable optical forward model into the modeling framework. This change allows the transfer of complexity from the instrumental response into the forward model. The proposed model relies on stochastic gradient descent to estimate its parameters. Our framework paves the way to building powerful, physically motivated models that do not require special calibration data. This paper demonstrates the WaveDiff model in a simplified setting of a space telescope. The proposed framework represents a performance breakthrough with respect to the existing state-of-the-art data-driven approach. The pixel reconstruction errors decrease 6-fold at observation resolution and 44-fold for a 3x super-resolution. The ellipticity errors are reduced at least 20 times, and the size error is reduced more than 250 times. By only using noisy broad-band in-focus observations, we successfully capture the PSF chromatic variations due to diffraction. Code available at https://github.com/tobias-liaudat/wf-psf.

Tobias Liaudat, Jean-Luc Starck, Martin Kilbinger

The accurate modelling of the Point Spread Function (PSF) is of paramount importance in astronomical observations, as it allows for the correction of distortions and blurring caused by the telescope and atmosphere. PSF modelling is crucial for accurately measuring celestial objects' properties. The last decades brought us a steady increase in the power and complexity of astronomical telescopes and instruments. Upcoming galaxy surveys like Euclid and LSST will observe an unprecedented amount and quality of data. Modelling the PSF for these new facilities and surveys requires novel modelling techniques that can cope with the ever-tightening error requirements. The purpose of this review is three-fold. First, we introduce the optical background required for a more physically-motivated PSF modelling and propose an observational model that can be reused for future developments. Second, we provide an overview of the different physical contributors of the PSF, including the optic- and detector-level contributors and the atmosphere. We expect that the overview will help better understand the modelled effects. Third, we discuss the different methods for PSF modelling from the parametric and non-parametric families for ground- and space-based telescopes, with their advantages and limitations. Validation methods for PSF models are then addressed, with several metrics related to weak lensing studies discussed in detail. Finally, we explore current challenges and future directions in PSF modelling for astronomical telescopes.

Denise Lanzieri, François Lanusse, Jean-Luc Starck

We present a new scheme to compensate for the small-scales approximations resulting from Particle-Mesh (PM) schemes for cosmological N-body simulations. This kind of simulations are fast and low computational cost realizations of the large scale structures, but lack resolution on small scales. To improve their accuracy, we introduce an additional effective force within the differential equations of the simulation, parameterized by a Fourier-space Neural Network acting on the PM-estimated gravitational potential. We compare the results for the matter power spectrum obtained to the ones obtained by the PGD scheme (Potential gradient descent scheme). We notice a similar improvement in term of power spectrum, but we find that our approach outperforms PGD for the cross-correlation coefficients, and is more robust to changes in simulation settings (different resolutions, different cosmologies).

Benjamin Naoto Chiche, Julien N. Girard, Joana Frontera-Pons et al.

Radio astronomy is currently thriving with new large ground-based radio telescopes coming online in preparation for the upcoming Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Facilities like LOFAR, MeerKAT/SKA, ASKAP/SKA, and the future SKA-LOW bring tremendous sensitivity in time and frequency, improved angular resolution, and also high-rate data streams that need to be processed. They enable advanced studies of radio transients, volatile by nature, that can be detected or missed in the data. These transients are markers of high-energy accelerations of electrons and manifest in a wide range of temporal scales. Usually studied with dynamic spectroscopy of time series analysis, there is a motivation to search for such sources in large interferometric datasets. This requires efficient and robust signal reconstruction algorithms. To correctly account for the temporal dependency of the data, we improve the classical image deconvolution inverse problem by adding the temporal dependency in the reconstruction problem. Then, we introduce two novel neural network architectures that can do both spatial and temporal modeling of the data and the instrumental response. Then, we simulate representative time-dependent image cubes of point source distributions and realistic telescope pointings of MeerKAT to generate toy models to build the training, validation, and test datasets. Finally, based on the test data, we evaluate the source profile reconstruction performance of the proposed methods and classical image deconvolution algorithm CLEAN applied frame-by-frame. In the presence of increasing noise level in data frame, the proposed methods display a high level of robustness compared to frame-by-frame imaging with CLEAN. The deconvolved image cubes bring a factor of 3 improvement in fidelity of the recovered temporal profiles and a factor of 2 improvement in background denoising.

Jianfei Li, Ines Rosellon-Inclan, Gitta Kutyniok et al.

U-Net and other U-shaped architectures have achieved significant success in image deconvolution tasks. However, challenges have emerged, as these methods might generate unrealistic artifacts or hallucinations, which can interfere with analysis in safety-critical scenarios. This paper introduces a novel approach for quantifying and comprehending hallucination artifacts to ensure trustworthy computer vision models. Our method, termed the Conformal Hallucination Estimation Metric (CHEM), is applicable to any image reconstruction model, enabling efficient identification and quantification of hallucination artifacts. It offers two key advantages: it leverages wavelet and shearlet representations to efficiently extract hallucinations of image features and uses conformalized quantile regression to assess hallucination levels in a distribution-free manner. Furthermore, from an approximation theoretical perspective, we explore the reasons why U-shaped networks are prone to hallucinations. We test the proposed approach on the CANDELS astronomical image dataset with models such as U-Net, SwinUNet, and Learnlets, and provide new perspectives on hallucination from different aspects in deep learning-based image processing.

Hubert Leterme, Andreas Tersenov, Jalal Fadili et al.

Upcoming stage-IV surveys such as Euclid and Rubin will deliver vast amounts of high-precision data, opening new opportunities to constrain cosmological models with unprecedented accuracy. A key step in this process is the reconstruction of the dark matter distribution from noisy weak lensing shear measurements. Current deep learning-based mass mapping methods achieve high reconstruction accuracy, but either require retraining a model for each new observed sky region (limiting practicality) or rely on slow MCMC sampling. Efficient exploitation of future survey data therefore calls for a new method that is accurate, flexible, and fast at inference. In addition, uncertainty quantification with coverage guarantees is essential for reliable cosmological parameter estimation. We introduce PnPMass, a plug-and-play approach for weak lensing mass mapping. The algorithm produces point estimates by alternating between a gradient descent step with a carefully chosen data fidelity term, and a denoising step implemented with a single deep learning model trained on simulated data corrupted by Gaussian white noise. We also propose a fast, sampling-free uncertainty quantification scheme based on moment networks, with calibrated error bars obtained through conformal prediction to ensure coverage guarantees. Finally, we benchmark PnPMass against both model-driven and data-driven mass mapping techniques. PnPMass achieves performance close to that of state-of-the-art deep-learning methods while offering fast inference (converging in just a few iterations) and requiring only a single training phase, independently of the noise covariance of the observations. It therefore combines flexibility, efficiency, and reconstruction accuracy, while delivering tighter error bars than existing approaches, making it well suited for upcoming weak lensing surveys.

Zaccharie Ramzi, Jean-Luc Starck, Philippe Ciuciu

Deep neural networks have recently been thoroughly investigated as a powerful tool for MRI reconstruction. There is a lack of research, however, regarding their use for a specific setting of MRI, namely non-Cartesian acquisitions. In this work, we introduce a novel kind of deep neural networks to tackle this problem, namely density compensated unrolled neural networks, which rely on Density Compensation to correct the uneven weighting of the k-space. We assess their efficiency on the publicly available fastMRI dataset, and perform a small ablation study. Our results show that the density-compensated unrolled neural networks outperform the different baselines, and that all parts of the design are needed. We also open source our code, in particular a Non-Uniform Fast Fourier transform for TensorFlow.

Utsav Akhaury, Pascale Jablonka, Jean-Luc Starck et al.

As ground-based all-sky astronomical surveys will gather millions of images in the coming years, a critical requirement emerges for the development of fast deconvolution algorithms capable of efficiently improving the spatial resolution of these images. By successfully recovering clean and high-resolution images from these surveys, the objective is to deepen the understanding of galaxy formation and evolution through accurate photometric measurements. We introduce a two-step deconvolution framework using a Swin Transformer architecture. Our study reveals that the deep learning-based solution introduces a bias, constraining the scope of scientific analysis. To address this limitation, we propose a novel third step relying on the active coefficients in the sparsity wavelet framework. We conducted a performance comparison between our deep learning-based method and Firedec, a classical deconvolution algorithm, based on an analysis of a subset of the EDisCS cluster samples. We demonstrate the advantage of our method in terms of resolution recovery, generalisation to different noise properties, and computational efficiency. The analysis of this cluster sample not only allowed us to assess the efficiency of our method, but it also enabled us to quantify the number of clumps within these galaxies in relation to their disc colour. This robust technique that we propose holds promise for identifying structures in the distant universe through ground-based images.

Utsav Akhaury, Pascale Jablonka, Frédéric Courbin et al.

With the advent of surveys like Euclid and Vera C. Rubin, astrophysicists will have access to both deep, high-resolution images and multiband images. However, these two types are not simultaneously available in any single dataset. It is therefore vital to devise image deconvolution algorithms that exploit the best of both worlds and that can jointly analyze datasets spanning a range of resolutions and wavelengths. In this work we introduce a novel multiband deconvolution technique aimed at improving the resolution of ground-based astronomical images by leveraging higher-resolution space-based observations. The method capitalizes on the fortunate fact that the Rubin $r$, $i$, and $z$ bands lie within the Euclid VIS band. The algorithm jointly de-convolves all the data to convert the $r$-, $i$-, and $z$-band Rubin images to the resolution of Euclid by leveraging the correlations between the different bands. We also investigate the performance of deep-learning-based denoising with DRUNet to further improve the results. We illustrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of resolution and morphology recovery, flux preservation, and generalization to different noise levels. This approach extends beyond the specific Euclid-Rubin combination, offering a versatile solution to improving the resolution of ground-based images in multiple photometric bands by jointly using any space-based images with overlapping filters.

Benjamin Remy, Francois Lanusse, Niall Jeffrey et al.

Weak lensing mass-mapping is a useful tool to access the full distribution of dark matter on the sky, but because of intrinsic galaxy ellipticies and finite fields/missing data, the recovery of dark matter maps constitutes a challenging ill-posed inverse problem. We introduce a novel methodology allowing for efficient sampling of the high-dimensional Bayesian posterior of the weak lensing mass-mapping problem, and relying on simulations for defining a fully non-Gaussian prior. We aim to demonstrate the accuracy of the method on simulations, and then proceed to applying it to the mass reconstruction of the HST/ACS COSMOS field. The proposed methodology combines elements of Bayesian statistics, analytic theory, and a recent class of Deep Generative Models based on Neural Score Matching. This approach allows us to do the following: 1) Make full use of analytic cosmological theory to constrain the 2pt statistics of the solution. 2) Learn from cosmological simulations any differences between this analytic prior and full simulations. 3) Obtain samples from the full Bayesian posterior of the problem for robust Uncertainty Quantification. We demonstrate the method on the $κ$TNG simulations and find that the posterior mean significantly outperfoms previous methods (Kaiser-Squires, Wiener filter, Sparsity priors) both on root-mean-square error and in terms of the Pearson correlation. We further illustrate the interpretability of the recovered posterior by establishing a close correlation between posterior convergence values and SNR of clusters artificially introduced into a field. Finally, we apply the method to the reconstruction of the HST/ACS COSMOS field and yield the highest quality convergence map of this field to date.

Benjamin Naoto Chiche, Arnaud Woiselle, Joana Frontera-Pons et al.

Recurrent models have gained popularity in deep learning (DL) based video super-resolution (VSR), due to their increased computational efficiency, temporal receptive field and temporal consistency compared to sliding-window based models. However, when inferring on long video sequences presenting low motion (i.e. in which some parts of the scene barely move), recurrent models diverge through recurrent processing, generating high frequency artifacts. To the best of our knowledge, no study about VSR pointed out this instability problem, which can be critical for some real-world applications. Video surveillance is a typical example where such artifacts would occur, as both the camera and the scene stay static for a long time. In this work, we expose instabilities of existing recurrent VSR networks on long sequences with low motion. We demonstrate it on a new long sequence dataset Quasi-Static Video Set, that we have created. Finally, we introduce a new framework of recurrent VSR networks that is both stable and competitive, based on Lipschitz stability theory. We propose a new recurrent VSR network, coined Middle Recurrent Video Super-Resolution (MRVSR), based on this framework. We empirically show its competitive performance on long sequences with low motion.

Tobias Liaudat, Jean-Luc Starck, Martin Kilbinger et al.

We propose a paradigm shift in the data-driven modeling of the instrumental response field of telescopes. By adding a differentiable optical forward model into the modeling framework, we change the data-driven modeling space from the pixels to the wavefront. This allows to transfer a great deal of complexity from the instrumental response into the forward model while being able to adapt to the observations, remaining data-driven. Our framework allows a way forward to building powerful models that are physically motivated, interpretable, and that do not require special calibration data. We show that for a simplified setting of a space telescope, this framework represents a real performance breakthrough compared to existing data-driven approaches with reconstruction errors decreasing 5 fold at observation resolution and more than 10 fold for a 3x super-resolution. We successfully model chromatic variations of the instrument's response only using noisy broad-band in-focus observations.

Zaccharie Ramzi, Alexandre Vignaud, Jean-Luc Starck et al.

We perform a qualitative analysis of performance of XPDNet, a state-of-the-art deep learning approach for MRI reconstruction, compared to GRAPPA, a classical approach. We do this in multiple settings, in particular testing the robustness of the XPDNet to unseen settings, and show that the XPDNet can to some degree generalize well.

Zaccharie Ramzi, Florian Mannel, Shaojie Bai et al.

In recent years, implicit deep learning has emerged as a method to increase the effective depth of deep neural networks. While their training is memory-efficient, they are still significantly slower to train than their explicit counterparts. In Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs), the training is performed as a bi-level problem, and its computational complexity is partially driven by the iterative inversion of a huge Jacobian matrix. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to tackle this computational bottleneck from which many bi-level problems suffer. The main idea is to use the quasi-Newton matrices from the forward pass to efficiently approximate the inverse Jacobian matrix in the direction needed for the gradient computation. We provide a theorem that motivates using our method with the original forward algorithms. In addition, by modifying these forward algorithms, we further provide theoretical guarantees that our method asymptotically estimates the true implicit gradient. We empirically study this approach and the recent Jacobian-Free method in different settings, ranging from hyperparameter optimization to large Multiscale DEQs (MDEQs) applied to CIFAR and ImageNet. Both methods reduce significantly the computational cost of the backward pass. While SHINE has a clear advantage on hyperparameter optimization problems, both methods attain similar computational performances for larger scale problems such as MDEQs at the cost of a limited performance drop compared to the original models.

Benjamin Naoto Chiche, Arnaud Woiselle, Joana Frontera-Pons et al.

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to reconstruct a sequence of high-resolution (HR) images from their corresponding low-resolution (LR) versions. Traditionally, solving a VSR problem has been based on iterative algorithms that can exploit prior knowledge on image formation and assumptions on the motion. However, these classical methods struggle at incorporating complex statistics from natural images. Furthermore, VSR has recently benefited from the improvement brought by deep learning (DL) algorithms. These techniques can efficiently learn spatial patterns from large collections of images. Yet, they fail to incorporate some knowledge about the image formation model, which limits their flexibility. Unrolled optimization algorithms, developed for inverse problems resolution, allow to include prior information into deep learning architectures. They have been used mainly for single image restoration tasks. Adapting an unrolled neural network structure can bring the following benefits. First, this may increase performance of the super-resolution task. Then, this gives neural networks better interpretability. Finally, this allows flexibility in learning a single model to nonblindly deal with multiple degradations. In this paper, we propose a new VSR neural network based on unrolled optimization techniques and discuss its performance.

Matthew J. Muckley, Bruno Riemenschneider, Alireza Radmanesh et al.

Accelerating MRI scans is one of the principal outstanding problems in the MRI research community. Towards this goal, we hosted the second fastMRI competition targeted towards reconstructing MR images with subsampled k-space data. We provided participants with data from 7,299 clinical brain scans (de-identified via a HIPAA-compliant procedure by NYU Langone Health), holding back the fully-sampled data from 894 of these scans for challenge evaluation purposes. In contrast to the 2019 challenge, we focused our radiologist evaluations on pathological assessment in brain images. We also debuted a new Transfer track that required participants to submit models evaluated on MRI scanners from outside the training set. We received 19 submissions from eight different groups. Results showed one team scoring best in both SSIM scores and qualitative radiologist evaluations. We also performed analysis on alternative metrics to mitigate the effects of background noise and collected feedback from the participants to inform future challenges. Lastly, we identify common failure modes across the submissions, highlighting areas of need for future research in the MRI reconstruction community.

Zaccharie Ramzi, Benjamin Remy, Francois Lanusse et al.

Deep neural networks have proven extremely efficient at solving a wide rangeof inverse problems, but most often the uncertainty on the solution they provideis hard to quantify. In this work, we propose a generic Bayesian framework forsolving inverse problems, in which we limit the use of deep neural networks tolearning a prior distribution on the signals to recover. We adopt recent denoisingscore matching techniques to learn this prior from data, and subsequently use it aspart of an annealed Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo scheme to sample the full posteriorof image inverse problems. We apply this framework to Magnetic ResonanceImage (MRI) reconstruction and illustrate how this approach not only yields highquality reconstructions but can also be used to assess the uncertainty on particularfeatures of a reconstructed image.

Zaccharie Ramzi, Philippe Ciuciu, Jean-Luc Starck

We present a new neural network, the XPDNet, for MRI reconstruction from periodically under-sampled multi-coil data. We inform the design of this network by taking best practices from MRI reconstruction and computer vision. We show that this network can achieve state-of-the-art reconstruction results, as shown by its ranking of second in the fastMRI 2020 challenge.

Khanh-Hung Tran, Fred-Maurice Ngole-Mboula, Jean-Luc Starck

Machine Learning in general and Deep Learning in particular has gained much interest in the recent decade and has shown significant performance improvements for many Computer Vision or Natural Language Processing tasks. In order to deal with databases which have just a small amount of training samples or to deal with models which have large amount of parameters, the regularization is indispensable. In this paper, we enforce the manifold preservation (manifold learning) from the original data into latent presentation by using "manifold attack". The later is inspired in a fashion of adversarial learning : finding virtual points that distort mostly the manifold preservation then using these points as supplementary samples to train the model. We show that our approach of regularization provides improvements for the accuracy rate and for the robustness to adversarial examples.

Khanh-Hung Tran, Fred-Maurice Ngole-Mboula, Jean-Luc Starck et al.

Supervised Dictionary Learning has gained much interest in the recent decade and has shown significant performance improvements in image classification. However, in general, supervised learning needs a large number of labelled samples per class to achieve an acceptable result. In order to deal with databases which have just a few labelled samples per class, semi-supervised learning, which also exploits unlabelled samples in training phase is used. Indeed, unlabelled samples can help to regularize the learning model, yielding an improvement of classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised dictionary learning method based on two pillars: on one hand, we enforce manifold structure preservation from the original data into sparse code space using Locally Linear Embedding, which can be considered a regularization of sparse code; on the other hand, we train a semi-supervised classifier in sparse code space. We show that our approach provides an improvement over state-of-the-art semi-supervised dictionary learning methods.

Florent Sureau, Alexis Lechat, Jean-Luc Starck

Deconvolution of large survey images with millions of galaxies requires to develop a new generation of methods which can take into account a space variant Point Spread Function (PSF) and have to be at the same time accurate and fast. We investigate in this paper how Deep Learning (DL) could be used to perform this task. We employ a U-Net Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture to learn in a supervised setting parameters adapted for galaxy image processing and study two strategies for deconvolution. The first approach is a post-processing of a mere Tikhonov deconvolution with closed form solution and the second one is an iterative deconvolution framework based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Our numerical results based on GREAT3 simulations with realistic galaxy images and PSFs show that our two approaches outperforms standard techniques based on convex optimization, whether assessed in galaxy image reconstruction or shape recovery. The approach based on Tikhonov deconvolution leads to the most accurate results except for ellipticity errors at high signal to noise ratio where the ADMM approach performs slightly better, is also more computation-time efficient to process a large number of galaxies, and is therefore recommended in this scenario.

Khanh-Hung Tran, Fred-Maurice Ngole-Mboula, Jean-Luc Starck

In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised dictionary learning method that uses both the information in labelled and unlabelled data and jointly trains a linear classifier embedded on the sparse codes. The manifold structure of the data in the sparse code space is preserved using the same approach as the Locally Linear Embedding method (LLE). This enables one to enforce the predictive power of the unlabelled data sparse codes. We show that our approach provides significant improvements over other methods. The results can be further improved by training a simple nonlinear classifier as SVM on the sparse codes.

Julian Merten, Carlo Giocoli, Marco Baldi et al.

Based on the DUSTGRAIN-pathfinder suite of simulations, we investigate observational degeneracies between nine models of modified gravity and massive neutrinos. Three types of machine learning techniques are tested for their ability to discriminate lensing convergence maps by extracting dimensional reduced representations of the data. Classical map descriptors such as the power spectrum, peak counts and Minkowski functionals are combined into a joint feature vector and compared to the descriptors and statistics that are common to the field of digital image processing. To learn new features directly from the data we use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). For the mapping between feature vectors and the predictions of their underlying model, we implement two different classifiers; one based on a nearest-neighbour search and one that is based on a fully connected neural network. We find that the neural network provides a much more robust classification than the nearest-neighbour approach and that the CNN provides the most discriminating representation of the data. It achieves the cleanest separation between the different models and the highest classification success rate of 59% for a single source redshift. Once we perform a tomographic CNN analysis, the total classification accuracy increases significantly to 76% with no observational degeneracies remaining. Visualising the filter responses of the CNN at different network depths provides us with the unique opportunity to learn from very complex models and to understand better why they perform so well.

Morgan A. Schmitz, Matthieu Heitz, Nicolas Bonneel et al.

This paper introduces a new nonlinear dictionary learning method for histograms in the probability simplex. The method leverages optimal transport theory, in the sense that our aim is to reconstruct histograms using so-called displacement interpolations (a.k.a. Wasserstein barycenters) between dictionary atoms; such atoms are themselves synthetic histograms in the probability simplex. Our method simultaneously estimates such atoms, and, for each datapoint, the vector of weights that can optimally reconstruct it as an optimal transport barycenter of such atoms. Our method is computationally tractable thanks to the addition of an entropic regularization to the usual optimal transportation problem, leading to an approximation scheme that is efficient, parallel and simple to differentiate. Both atoms and weights are learned using a gradient-based descent method. Gradients are obtained by automatic differentiation of the generalized Sinkhorn iterations that yield barycenters with entropic smoothing. Because of its formulation relying on Wasserstein barycenters instead of the usual matrix product between dictionary and codes, our method allows for nonlinear relationships between atoms and the reconstruction of input data. We illustrate its application in several different image processing settings.

Jerome Bobin, Jeremy Rapin, Anthony Larue et al.

Blind source separation (BSS) is a very popular technique to analyze multichannel data. In this context, the data are modeled as the linear combination of sources to be retrieved. For that purpose, standard BSS methods all rely on some discrimination principle, whether it is statistical independence or morphological diversity, to distinguish between the sources. However, dealing with real-world data reveals that such assumptions are rarely valid in practice: the signals of interest are more likely partially correlated, which generally hampers the performances of standard BSS methods. In this article, we introduce a novel sparsity-enforcing BSS method coined Adaptive Morphological Component Analysis (AMCA), which is designed to retrieve sparse and partially correlated sources. More precisely, it makes profit of an adaptive re-weighting scheme to favor/penalize samples based on their level of correlation. Extensive numerical experiments have been carried out which show that the proposed method is robust to the partial correlation of sources while standard BSS techniques fail. The AMCA algorithm is evaluated in the field of astrophysics for the separation of physical components from microwave data.

Fred Maurice Ngolè Mboula, Jean-Luc Starck, Samuel Ronayette et al.

In large-scale spatial surveys, such as the forthcoming ESA Euclid mission, images may be undersampled due to the optical sensors sizes. Therefore, one may consider using a super-resolution (SR) method to recover aliased frequencies, prior to further analysis. This is particularly relevant for point-source images, which provide direct measurements of the instrument point-spread function (PSF). We introduce SPRITE, SParse Recovery of InsTrumental rEsponse, which is an SR algorithm using a sparse analysis prior. We show that such a prior provides significant improvements over existing methods, especially on low SNR PSFs.

Jérémy Rapin, Jérôme Bobin, Anthony Larue et al.

Non-negative blind source separation (non-negative BSS), which is also referred to as non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), is a very active field in domains as different as astrophysics, audio processing or biomedical signal processing. In this context, the efficient retrieval of the sources requires the use of signal priors such as sparsity. If NMF has now been well studied with sparse constraints in the direct domain, only very few algorithms can encompass non-negativity together with sparsity in a transformed domain since simultaneously dealing with two priors in two different domains is challenging. In this article, we show how a sparse NMF algorithm coined non-negative generalized morphological component analysis (nGMCA) can be extended to impose non-negativity in the direct domain along with sparsity in a transformed domain, with both analysis and synthesis formulations. To our knowledge, this work presents the first comparison of analysis and synthesis priors ---as well as their reweighted versions--- in the context of blind source separation. Comparisons with state-of-the-art NMF algorithms on realistic data show the efficiency as well as the robustness of the proposed algorithms.

Jérémy Rapin, Jérôme Bobin, Anthony Larue et al.

Non-negative blind source separation (BSS) has raised interest in various fields of research, as testified by the wide literature on the topic of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). In this context, it is fundamental that the sources to be estimated present some diversity in order to be efficiently retrieved. Sparsity is known to enhance such contrast between the sources while producing very robust approaches, especially to noise. In this paper we introduce a new algorithm in order to tackle the blind separation of non-negative sparse sources from noisy measurements. We first show that sparsity and non-negativity constraints have to be carefully applied on the sought-after solution. In fact, improperly constrained solutions are unlikely to be stable and are therefore sub-optimal. The proposed algorithm, named nGMCA (non-negative Generalized Morphological Component Analysis), makes use of proximal calculus techniques to provide properly constrained solutions. The performance of nGMCA compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms is demonstrated by numerical experiments encompassing a wide variety of settings, with negligible parameter tuning. In particular, nGMCA is shown to provide robustness to noise and performs well on synthetic mixtures of real NMR spectra.

Simon Beckouche, Jean-Luc Starck, Jalal Fadili

Astronomical images suffer a constant presence of multiple defects that are consequences of the intrinsic properties of the acquisition equipments, and atmospheric conditions. One of the most frequent defects in astronomical imaging is the presence of additive noise which makes a denoising step mandatory before processing data. During the last decade, a particular modeling scheme, based on sparse representations, has drawn the attention of an ever growing community of researchers. Sparse representations offer a promising framework to many image and signal processing tasks, especially denoising and restoration applications. At first, the harmonics, wavelets, and similar bases and overcomplete representations have been considered as candidate domains to seek the sparsest representation. A new generation of algorithms, based on data-driven dictionaries, evolved rapidly and compete now with the off-the-shelf fixed dictionaries. While designing a dictionary beforehand leans on a guess of the most appropriate representative elementary forms and functions, the dictionary learning framework offers to construct the dictionary upon the data themselves, which provides us with a more flexible setup to sparse modeling and allows to build more sophisticated dictionaries. In this paper, we introduce the Centered Dictionary Learning (CDL) method and we study its performances for astronomical image denoising. We show how CDL outperforms wavelet or classic dictionary learning denoising techniques on astronomical images, and we give a comparison of the effect of these different algorithms on the photometry of the denoised images.