DIPLI: Deep Image Prior Lucky Imaging for Blind Astronomical Image Restoration

Contemporary image restoration and super-resolution techniques effectively harness deep neural networks, markedly outperforming traditional methods. However, astrophotography presents unique challenges for deep learning due to limited training data. This work explores hybrid strategies, such as the Deep Image Prior (DIP) model, which facilitates blind training but is susceptible to overfitting, artifact generation, and instability when handling noisy images. We propose enhancements to the DIP model's baseline performance through several advanced techniques. First, we refine the model to process multiple frames concurrently, employing the Back Projection method and the TVNet model. Next, we adopt a Markov approach incorporating Monte Carlo estimation, Langevin dynamics, and a variational input technique to achieve unbiased estimates with minimal variance and counteract overfitting effectively. Collectively, these modifications reduce the likelihood of noise learning and mitigate loss function fluctuations during training, enhancing result stability. We validated our algorithm across multiple image sets of astronomical and celestial objects, achieving performance that not only mitigates limitations of Lucky Imaging, a classical computer vision technique that remains a standard in astronomical image reconstruction but surpasses the original DIP model, state of the art transformer- and diffusion-based models, underscoring the significance of our improvements.