Xiangyu Rui

Naishan Zheng, Man Zhou, Yanmeng Dong et al.

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable progress in enhancing low-light images by improving their brightness and eliminating noise. However, most existing methods construct end-to-end mapping networks heuristically, neglecting the intrinsic prior of image enhancement task and lacking transparency and interpretability. Although some unfolding solutions have been proposed to relieve these issues, they rely on proximal operator networks that deliver ambiguous and implicit priors. In this work, we propose a paradigm for low-light image enhancement that explores the potential of customized learnable priors to improve the transparency of the deep unfolding paradigm. Motivated by the powerful feature representation capability of Masked Autoencoder (MAE), we customize MAE-based illumination and noise priors and redevelop them from two perspectives: 1) \textbf{structure flow}: we train the MAE from a normal-light image to its illumination properties and then embed it into the proximal operator design of the unfolding architecture; and m2) \textbf{optimization flow}: we train MAE from a normal-light image to its gradient representation and then employ it as a regularization term to constrain noise in the model output. These designs improve the interpretability and representation capability of the model.Extensive experiments on multiple low-light image enhancement datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed paradigm over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zheng980629/CUE.

Xiangyu Rui, Xiangyong Cao, Yining Li et al.

Pansharpening aims to generate a high spatial resolution multispectral image (HRMS) by fusing a low spatial resolution multispectral image (LRMS) and a panchromatic image (PAN). The most challenging issue for this task is that only the to-be-fused LRMS and PAN are available, and the existing deep learning-based methods are unsuitable since they rely on many training pairs. Traditional variational optimization (VO) based methods are well-suited for addressing such a problem. They focus on carefully designing explicit fusion rules as well as regularizations for an optimization problem, which are based on the researcher's discovery of the image relationships and image structures. Unlike previous VO-based methods, in this work, we explore such complex relationships by a parameterized term rather than a manually designed one. Specifically, we propose a zero-shot pansharpening method by introducing a neural network into the optimization objective. This network estimates a representation component of HRMS, which mainly describes the relationship between HRMS and PAN. In this way, the network achieves a similar goal to the so-called deep image prior because it implicitly regulates the relationship between the HRMS and PAN images through its inherent structure. We directly minimize this optimization objective via network parameters and the expected HRMS image through iterative updating. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve better performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/xyrui/PSDip.

Jiangjun Peng, Hailin Wang, Xiangyong Cao et al.

Mining structural priors in data is a widely recognized technique for hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising tasks, whose typical ways include model-based methods and data-based methods. The model-based methods have good generalization ability, while the runtime cannot meet the fast processing requirements of the practical situations due to the large size of an HSI data $ \mathbf{X} \in \mathbb{R}^{MN\times B}$. For the data-based methods, they perform very fast on new test data once they have been trained. However, their generalization ability is always insufficient. In this paper, we propose a fast model-based HSI denoising approach. Specifically, we propose a novel regularizer named Representative Coefficient Total Variation (RCTV) to simultaneously characterize the low rank and local smooth properties. The RCTV regularizer is proposed based on the observation that the representative coefficient matrix $\mathbf{U}\in\mathbb{R}^{MN\times R} (R\ll B)$ obtained by orthogonally transforming the original HSI $\mathbf{X}$ can inherit the strong local-smooth prior of $\mathbf{X}$. Since $R/B$ is very small, the HSI denoising model based on the RCTV regularizer has lower time complexity. Additionally, we find that the representative coefficient matrix $\mathbf{U}$ is robust to noise, and thus the RCTV regularizer can somewhat promote the robustness of the HSI denoising model. Extensive experiments on mixed noise removal demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method both in denoising performance and denoising speed compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, the denoising speed of our proposed method outperforms all the model-based techniques and is comparable with the deep learning-based approaches.

Xiangyu Rui, Xiangyong Cao, Xile Zhao et al.

In a variational denoising model, weight in the data fidelity term plays the role of enhancing the noise-removal capability. It is profoundly correlated with noise information, while also balancing the data fidelity and regularization terms. However, the difficulty of assigning weight is expected to be substantial when the noise pattern is beyond independent identical Gaussian distribution, e.g., impulse noise, stripe noise, or a mixture of several patterns, etc. Furthermore, how to leverage weight to balance the data fidelity and regularization terms is even less evident. In this work, we propose a data-driven loss weighting (DLW) scheme to address these issues. Specifically, DLW trains a parameterized weight function (i.e., a neural network) that maps the noisy image to the weight. The training is achieved by a bilevel optimization framework, where the lower level problem is solving several denoising models with the same weight predicted by the weight function and the upper level problem minimizes the distance between the restored image and the clean image. In this way, information from both the noise and the regularization can be efficiently extracted to determine the weight function. DLW also facilitates the easy implementation of a trained weight function on denoising models. Numerical results verify the remarkable performance of DLW on improving the ability of various variational denoising models to handle different complex noise. This implies that DLW has the ability to transfer the noise knowledge at the model level to heterogeneous tasks beyond the training ones and the generalization theory underlying DLW is studied, validating its intrinsic transferability.

Man Zhou, Naishan Zheng, Jie Huang et al.

In this paper, orthogonal to the existing data and model studies, we instead resort our efforts to investigate the potential of loss function in a new perspective and present our belief ``Random Weights Networks can Be Acted as Loss Prior Constraint for Image Restoration''. Inspired by Functional theory, we provide several alternative solutions to implement our belief in the strict mathematical manifolds including Taylor's Unfolding Network, Invertible Neural Network, Central Difference Convolution and Zero-order Filtering as ``random weights network prototype'' with respect of the following four levels: 1) the different random weights strategies; 2) the different network architectures, \emph{eg,} pure convolution layer or transformer; 3) the different network architecture depths; 4) the different numbers of random weights network combination. Furthermore, to enlarge the capability of the randomly initialized manifolds, we devise the manner of random weights in the following two variants: 1) the weights are randomly initialized only once during the whole training procedure; 2) the weights are randomly initialized at each training iteration epoch. Our propose belief can be directly inserted into existing networks without any training and testing computational cost. Extensive experiments across multiple image restoration tasks, including image de-noising, low-light image enhancement, guided image super-resolution demonstrate the consistent performance gains obtained by introducing our belief. To emphasize, our main focus is to spark the realms of loss function and save their current neglected status. Code will be publicly available.

Li Pang, Xiangyu Rui, Long Cui et al.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration aims at recovering clean images from degraded observations and plays a vital role in downstream tasks. Existing model-based methods have limitations in accurately modeling the complex image characteristics with handcraft priors, and deep learning-based methods suffer from poor generalization ability. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes an unsupervised HSI restoration framework with pre-trained diffusion model (HIR-Diff), which restores the clean HSIs from the product of two low-rank components, i.e., the reduced image and the coefficient matrix. Specifically, the reduced image, which has a low spectral dimension, lies in the image field and can be inferred from our improved diffusion model where a new guidance function with total variation (TV) prior is designed to ensure that the reduced image can be well sampled. The coefficient matrix can be effectively pre-estimated based on singular value decomposition (SVD) and rank-revealing QR (RRQR) factorization. Furthermore, a novel exponential noise schedule is proposed to accelerate the restoration process (about 5$\times$ acceleration for denoising) with little performance decrease. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our method in both performance and speed on a variety of HSI restoration tasks, including HSI denoising, noisy HSI super-resolution, and noisy HSI inpainting. The code is available at https://github.com/LiPang/HIRDiff.

Xiangyu Rui, Xiangyong Cao, Li Pang et al.

Hyperspectral pansharpening is a process of merging a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image and a low-resolution hyperspectral (LRHS) image to create a single high-resolution hyperspectral (HRHS) image. Existing Bayesian-based HS pansharpening methods require designing handcraft image prior to characterize the image features, and deep learning-based HS pansharpening methods usually require a large number of paired training data and suffer from poor generalization ability. To address these issues, in this work, we propose a low-rank diffusion model for hyperspectral pansharpening by simultaneously leveraging the power of the pre-trained deep diffusion model and better generalization ability of Bayesian methods. Specifically, we assume that the HRHS image can be recovered from the product of two low-rank tensors, i.e., the base tensor and the coefficient matrix. The base tensor lies on the image field and has a low spectral dimension. Thus, we can conveniently utilize a pre-trained remote sensing diffusion model to capture its image structures. Additionally, we derive a simple yet quite effective way to pre-estimate the coefficient matrix from the observed LRHS image, which preserves the spectral information of the HRHS. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than some popular traditional approaches and gains better generalization ability than some DL-based methods. The code is released in https://github.com/xyrui/PLRDiff.