PG-DPIR: An efficient plug-and-play method for high-count Poisson-Gaussian inverse problems

Poisson-Gaussian noise describes the noise of various imaging systems thus the need of efficient algorithms for Poisson-Gaussian image restoration. Deep learning methods offer state-of-the-art performance but often require sensor-specific training when used in a supervised setting. A promising alternative is given by plug-and-play (PnP) methods, which consist in learning only a regularization through a denoiser, allowing to restore images from several sources with the same network. This paper introduces PG-DPIR, an efficient PnP method for high-count Poisson-Gaussian inverse problems, adapted from DPIR. While DPIR is designed for white Gaussian noise, a naive adaptation to Poisson-Gaussian noise leads to prohibitively slow algorithms due to the absence of a closed-form proximal operator. To address this, we adapt DPIR for the specificities of Poisson-Gaussian noise and propose in particular an efficient initialization of the gradient descent required for the proximal step that accelerates convergence by several orders of magnitude. Experiments are conducted on satellite image restoration and super-resolution problems. High-resolution realistic Pleiades images are simulated for the experiments, which demonstrate that PG-DPIR achieves state-of-the-art performance with improved efficiency, which seems promising for on-ground satellite processing chains.

Variational Bayes image restoration with compressive autoencoders

Regularization of inverse problems is of paramount importance in computational imaging. The ability of neural networks to learn efficient image representations has been recently exploited to design powerful data-driven regularizers. While state-of-the-art plug-and-play methods rely on an implicit regularization provided by neural denoisers, alternative Bayesian approaches consider Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation in the latent space of a generative model, thus with an explicit regularization. However, state-of-the-art deep generative models require a huge amount of training data compared to denoisers. Besides, their complexity hampers the optimization of the latent MAP. In this work, we propose to use compressive autoencoders for latent estimation. These networks, which can be seen as variational autoencoders with a flexible latent prior, are smaller and easier to train than state-of-the-art generative models. We then introduce the Variational Bayes Latent Estimation (VBLE) algorithm, which performs this estimation within the framework of variational inference. This allows for fast and easy (approximate) posterior sampling. Experimental results on image datasets BSD and FFHQ demonstrate that VBLE reaches similar performance than state-of-the-art plug-and-play methods, while being able to quantify uncertainties faster than other existing posterior sampling techniques.