Noise parameters estimation is needed for many tasks of digital image processing. Many efficient algorithms of noise variance estimation were proposed during last two decades. However, most of those estimators are efficient only for a specific kind of noise for which they were designed. For example, methods of estimation of variance of white additive Gaussian noise (AWGN) fail in the case of additive colored Gaussian noise (ACGN) or for noises with other distributions. In this paper a new fully blind method of noise level estimation is proposed. For a given image, a distorted image with a removed part of pixels (around 10%) is generated. Then an inpainting (or impulse noise removal) method is used to recover missed pixels values. The difference between true and recovered values is used for a robust estimation of noise level. The algorithm is applied for different image scales to estimate noise spectrum. In the paper we propose a convolutional neural network PIXPNet for effective prediction of values of missing pixels. A comparative analysis shows that the proposed PIXPNet provides smallest error of recovered pixels values among all existing methods. A good efficiency of usage of the proposed approach in both AWGN and spatially correlated noise suppression is demonstrated.
In this paper, a convolutional neural network for joint image demosaicing, denoising, deblurring, super-resolution and clarity enhancement is proposed. The network inputs are four-channel Bayer CFA image (R, G, G, B) and three channels of the same size containing distortions maps, namely, noise level map, blur level map, and clarity degradation map. It is shown that the designed network FiveNet can effectively process images with the mix of five different distortions. It is also demonstrated that adding clarity enhancement into the processing chain can additionally increase image quality (by up to 3-4 dB in PSNR). A small dataset ClarityDegr120 of color images with different clarity degradations and enhancements is designed using images processed by FiveNet. Mean opinion scores (MOS) for the test set are collected. The MOS prove that clarity enhancement can significantly increase image visual quality. A comparative analysis using the MOS demonstrates a low correspondence between image quality metrics and human perception for the clarity enhancement task.
One of the main problems of neural network-based no-reference metrics design for image visual quality assessment is small size of image databases with mean opinion scores (MOS). For large networks which can memorize key features of several thousands of images, usage of the databases for metrics training may lead to overlearning. Since data augmentation for image quality assessment is limited by a horizontal image flipping only, the main way to decrease overlearning is to use transfer learning which can significantly speed up training process. In theis paper, we propose a new technique of transfer learning between networks of different architectures using a large set of images without MOS. We implemented the technique for transfer learning between pre-trained KonCept512 metric and a IMQNet metric proposed in this paper. An effectiveness of the transfer learning is estimated in a numerical analysis. It is shown that the trained IMQNet metric provides significantly better correlation with KonCept512 metric (0.89) than other modern metrics. It is also shown that IMQNet pre-trained by the proposed transfer learning shows better correlation with MOS of KonIQ-10k database (0.86) than IMQNet pre-trained using directly the MOS of KonIQ10k (0.73).