Deyu Meng

Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising

The discriminative model learning for image denoising has been recently attracting considerable attentions due to its favorable denoising performance. In this paper, we take one step forward by investigating the construction of feed-forward denoising convolutional neural networks (DnCNNs) to embrace the progress in very deep architecture, learning algorithm, and regularization method into image denoising. Specifically, residual learning and batch normalization are utilized to speed up the training process as well as boost the denoising performance. Different from the existing discriminative denoising models which usually train a specific model for additive white Gaussian noise at a certain noise level, our DnCNN model is able to handle Gaussian denoising with unknown noise level (i.e., blind Gaussian denoising). With the residual learning strategy, DnCNN implicitly removes the latent clean image in the hidden layers. This property motivates us to train a single DnCNN model to tackle with several general image denoising tasks, such as Gaussian denoising, single image super-resolution, and JPEG image deblocking. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our DnCNN model can not only exhibit high effectiveness in several general image denoising tasks, but also be efficiently implemented by benefiting from GPU computing.

Infrared Patch-Image Model for Small Target Detection in a Single Image

The robust detection of small targets is one of the key techniques in infrared search and tracking applications. A novel small target detection method in a single infrared image is proposed in this paper. Initially, the traditional infrared image model is generalized to a new infrared patch-image model using local patch construction. Then, because of the non-local self-correlation property of the infrared background image, based on the new model small target detection is formulated as an optimization problem of recovering low-rank and sparse matrices, which is effectively solved using stable principle component pursuit. Finally, a simple adaptive segmentation method is used to segment the target image and the segmentation result can be refined by post-processing. Extensive synthetic and real data experiments show that under different clutter backgrounds the proposed method not only works more stably for different target sizes and signal-to-clutter ratio values, but also has better detection performance compared with conventional baseline methods.

Event Oriented Dictionary Learning for Complex Event Detection

Complex event detection is a retrieval task with the goal of finding videos of a particular event in a large-scale unconstrained Internet video archive, given example videos and text descriptions. Nowadays, different multimodal fusion schemes of low-level and high-level features are extensively investigated and evaluated for the complex event detection task. However, how to effectively select the high-level semantic meaningful concepts from a large pool to assist complex event detection is rarely studied in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to automatically select semantic meaningful concepts for the event detection task based on both the events-kit text descriptions and the concepts high-level feature descriptions. Moreover, we introduce a novel event oriented dictionary representation based on the selected semantic concepts. Toward this goal, we leverage training images (frames) of selected concepts from the semantic indexing dataset with a pool of 346 concepts, into a novel supervised multitask ℓp-norm dictionary learning framework. Extensive experimental results on TRECVID multimedia event detection dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method.

Easy Samples First: Self-paced Reranking for Zero-Example Multimedia Search

Reranking has been a focal technique in multimedia retrieval due to its efficacy in improving initial retrieval results. Current reranking methods, however, mainly rely on the heuristic weighting. In this paper, we propose a novel reranking approach called Self-Paced Reranking (SPaR) for multimodal data. As its name suggests, SPaR utilizes samples from easy to more complex ones in a self-paced fashion. SPaR is special in that it has a concise mathematical objective to optimize and useful properties that can be theoretically verified. It on one hand offers a unified framework providing theoretical justifications for current reranking methods, and on the other hand generates a spectrum of new reranking schemes. This paper also advances the state-of-the-art self-paced learning research which potentially benefits applications in other fields. Experimental results validate the efficacy and the efficiency of the proposed method on both image and video search tasks. Notably, SPaR achieves by far the best result on the challenging TRECVID multimedia event search task.

A Generalized Iterated Shrinkage Algorithm for Non-convex Sparse Coding

In many sparse coding based image restoration and image classification problems, using non-convex Ip-norm minimization (0 ≤ p <; 1) can often obtain better results than the convex l1-norm minimization. A number of algorithms, e.g., iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS), iteratively thresholding method (ITM-Ip), and look-up table (LUT), have been proposed for non-convex Ip-norm sparse coding, while some analytic solutions have been suggested for some specific values of p. In this paper, by extending the popular soft-thresholding operator, we propose a generalized iterated shrinkage algorithm (GISA) for Ip-norm non-convex sparse coding. Unlike the analytic solutions, the proposed GISA algorithm is easy to implement, and can be adopted for solving non-convex sparse coding problems with arbitrary p values. Compared with LUT, GISA is more general and does not need to compute and store the look-up tables. Compared with IRLS and ITM-Ip, GISA is theoretically more solid and can achieve more accurate solutions. Experiments on image restoration and sparse coding based face recognition are conducted to validate the performance of GISA.

Convolutional Sparse Coding for Image Super-Resolution

Most of the previous sparse coding (SC) based super resolution (SR) methods partition the image into overlapped patches, and process each patch separately. These methods, however, ignore the consistency of pixels in overlapped patches, which is a strong constraint for image reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a convolutional sparse coding (CSC) based SR (CSC-SR) method to address the consistency issue. Our CSC-SR involves three groups of parameters to be learned: (i) a set of filters to decompose the low resolution (LR) image into LR sparse feature maps, (ii) a mapping function to predict the high resolution (HR) feature maps from the LR ones, and (iii) a set of filters to reconstruct the HR images from the predicted HR feature maps via simple convolution operations. By working directly on the whole image, the proposed CSC-SR algorithm does not need to divide the image into overlapped patches, and can exploit the image global correlation to produce more robust reconstruction of image local structures. Experimental results clearly validate the advantages of CSC over patch based SC in SR application. Compared with state-of-the-art SR methods, the proposed CSC-SR method achieves highly competitive PSNR results, while demonstrating better edge and texture preservation performance.

Decomposable Nonlocal Tensor Dictionary Learning for Multispectral Image Denoising

As compared to the conventional RGB or gray-scale images, multispectral images (MSI) can deliver more faithful representation for real scenes, and enhance the performance of many computer vision tasks. In practice, however, an MSI is always corrupted by various noises. In this paper we propose an effective MSI denoising approach by combinatorially considering two intrinsic characteristics underlying an MSI: the nonlocal similarity over space and the global correlation across spectrum. In specific, by explicitly considering spatial self-similarity of an MSI we construct a nonlocal tensor dictionary learning model with a group-block-sparsity constraint, which makes similar full-band patches (FBP) share the same atoms from the spatial and spectral dictionaries. Furthermore, through exploiting spectral correlation of an MSI and assuming over-redundancy of dictionaries, the constrained nonlocal MSI dictionary learning model can be decomposed into a series of unconstrained low-rank tensor approximation problems, which can be readily solved by off-the-shelf higher order statistics. Experimental results show that our method outperforms all state-of-the-art MSI denoising methods under comprehensive quantitative performance measures.

Robust Matrix Factorization with Unknown Noise

Many problems in computer vision can be posed as recovering a low-dimensional subspace from high-dimensional visual data. Factorization approaches to low-rank subspace estimation minimize a loss function between the observed measurement matrix and a bilinear factorization. Most popular loss functions include the L1 and L2 losses. While L1 is optimal for Laplacian distributed noise, L2 is optimal for Gaussian noise. However, real data is often corrupted by an unknown noise distribution, which is unlikely to be purely Gaussian or Laplacian. To address this problem, this paper proposes a low-rank matrix factorization problem with a Mixture of Gaussians (MoG) noise. The MoG model is a universal approximator for any continuous distribution, and hence is able to model a wider range of real noise distributions. The parameters of the MoG model can be estimated with a maximum likelihood method, while the subspace is computed with standard approaches. We illustrate the benefits of our approach in extensive synthetic, structure from motion, face modeling and background subtraction experiments.

Weighted Nuclear Norm Minimization and Its Applications to Low Level Vision

As a convex relaxation of the rank minimization model, the nuclear norm minimization (NNM) problem has been attracting significant research interest in recent years. The standard NNM regularizes each singular value equally, composing an easily calculated convex norm. However, this restricts its capability and flexibility in dealing with many practical problems, where the singular values have clear physical meanings and should be treated differently. In this paper we study the weighted nuclear norm minimization (WNNM) problem, which adaptively assigns weights on different singular values. As the key step of solving general WNNM models, the theoretical properties of the weighted nuclear norm proximal (WNNP) operator are investigated. Albeit nonconvex, we prove that WNNP is equivalent to a standard quadratic programming problem with linear constrains, which facilitates solving the original problem with off-the-shelf convex optimization solvers. In particular, when the weights are sorted in a non-descending order, its optimal solution can be easily obtained in closed-form. With WNNP, the solving strategies for multiple extensions of WNNM, including robust PCA and matrix completion, can be readily constructed under the alternating direction method of multipliers paradigm. Furthermore, inspired by the reweighted sparse coding scheme, we present an automatic weight setting method, which greatly facilitates the practical implementation of WNNM. The proposed WNNM methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in typical low level vision tasks, including image denoising, background subtraction and image inpainting.

Fast and Efficient Strategies for Model Selection of Gaussian Support Vector Machine

Two strategies for selecting the kernel parameter (sigma) and the penalty coefficient (C) of Gaussian support vector machines (SVMs) are suggested in this paper. Based on viewing the model parameter selection problem as a recognition problem in visual systems, a direct parameter setting formula for the kernel parameter is derived through finding a visual scale at which the global and local structures of the given data set can be preserved in the feature space, and the difference between the two structures can be maximized. In addition, we propose a heuristic algorithm for the selection of the penalty coefficient through identifying the classification extent of a training datum in the implementation process of the sequential minimal optimization (SMO) procedure, which is a well-developed and commonly used algorithm in SVM training. We then evaluate the suggested strategies with a series of experiments on 13 benchmark problems and three real-world data sets, as compared with the traditional 5-cross validation (5-CV) method and the recently developed radius-margin bound (RM) method. The evaluation shows that in terms of efficiency and generalization capabilities, the new strategies outperform the current methods, and the performance is uniform and stable.