Peng Liu

Peng Liu, Ruogu Fang

In this work, we explore an innovative strategy for image denoising by using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to learn pixel-distribution from noisy data. By increasing CNN's width with large reception fields and more channels in each layer, CNNs can reveal the ability to learn pixel-distribution, which is a prior existing in many different types of noise. The key to our approach is a discovery that wider CNNs tends to learn the pixel-distribution features, which provides the probability of that inference-mapping primarily relies on the priors instead of deeper CNNs with more stacked nonlinear layers. We evaluate our work: Wide inference Networks (WIN) on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and demonstrate that by learning the pixel-distribution in images, WIN-based network consistently achieves significantly better performance than current state-of-the-art deep CNN-based methods in both quantitative and visual evaluations. \textit{Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/cswin/WIN}}.

Zichuan Chen, Peng Liu

VAE, or variational auto-encoder, compresses data into latent attributes, and generates new data of different varieties. VAE based on KL divergence has been considered as an effective technique for data augmentation. In this paper, we propose the use of Wasserstein distance as a measure of distributional similarity for the latent attributes, and show its superior theoretical lower bound (ELBO) compared with that of KL divergence under mild conditions. Using multiple experiments, we demonstrate that the new loss function exhibits better convergence property and generates artificial images that could better aid the image classification tasks.

Peng Liu, Xiaoxiao Zhou, Junyiyang Li et al.

One popular strategy for image denoising is to design a generalized regularization term that is capable of exploring the implicit prior underlying data observation. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown the powerful capability to learn image prior information through a stack of layers defined by a combination of kernels (filters) on the input. However, existing CNN-based methods mainly focus on synthetic gray-scale images. These methods still exhibit low performance when tackling multi-channel color image denoising. In this paper, we optimize CNN regularization capability by developing a kernel regulation module. In particular, we propose a kernel regulation network-block, referred to as KR-block, by integrating the merits of both large and small kernels, that can effectively estimate features in solving image denoising. We build a deep CNN-based denoiser, referred to as KRNET, via concatenating multiple KR-blocks. We evaluate KRNET on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), multi-channel (MC) noise, and realistic noise, where KRNET obtains significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods across a wide spectrum of noise levels.