JSTSP Volume 15 Issue 2

Image restoration remains a challenging task in image processing. Numerous methods tackle this problem, which is often solved by minimizing a nonsmooth penalized co-log-likelihood function. Although the solution is easily interpretable with theoretic guarantees, its estimation relies on an optimization process that can take time. Considering the research effort in deep learning for image classification and segmentation, this class of methods offers a serious alternative to perform image restoration but stays challenging to solve inverse problems.

Image restoration is a critical component of image processing pipelines and for low-level computer vision tasks. Conventional image restoration approaches are mostly based on hand-crafted image priors. The inter-channel correlation of color images is not fully exploited. Motivated by the special characteristics of the inter-channel correlation (higher correlation for red/green and green/blue channels than for red/blue) in color images and general characteristics (green channel always shows the best image quality among the three color components) of distorted color images, in this paper, a three-stage convolutional neural network (CNN) structure is proposed for color image restoration tasks.

The papers in this special issue focus on deep learning for image/video restoration and compression. The huge success of deep-learning–based approaches in computer vision has inspired research in learned solutions to classic image/video processing problems, such as denoising, deblurring, dehazing, deraining, super-resolution (SR), and compression. Hence, learning-based methods have emerged as a promising nonlinear signal-processing framework for image/ video restoration and compression.

The papers in this special issue focus on deep learning for image/video restoration and compression. The huge success of deep-learning–based approaches in computer vision has inspired research in learned solutions to classic image/video processing problems, such as denoising, deblurring, dehazing, deraining, super-resolution (SR), and compression. Hence, learning-based methods have emerged as a promising nonlinear signal-processing framework for image/ video restoration and compression.