Narrow Results

A blind image deblurring algorithm based on relative gradient and sparse representation is proposed in this paper. The layered method restores the image by three steps: edge extraction, blur kernel estimation and image reconstruction. The positive and negative gradients in texture part have reversal changes, and the edge part that reflects the image structure has only one gradient change. According to the characteristic, the edge of the image is extracted by using the relative gradient of image, so as to estimate the blur kernel of the image. In the stage of image reconstruction, in order to overcome the problem of oversize of the image and the overcomplete dictionary matrix, the image is divided into small blocks. An overcomplete dictionary is used for sparse representation, and the image is reconstructed by the iterative threshold shrinkage method to improve the quality of image restoration. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the quality of image restoration.

This paper aims to propose a candidate solution to the challenging task of single-image blind super-resolution (SR), via extensively exploring the potentials of learning-based SR schemes in the literature. The task is formulated into an energy functional to be minimized with respect to both an intermediate super-resolved image and a nonparametric blur-kernel. The functional includes a so-called convolutional consistency term which incorporates a nonblind learning-based SR result to better guide the kernel estimation process, and a bi-$L0$-$L2$-norm regularization imposed on both the super-resolved sharp image and the nonparametric blur-kernel. A numerical algorithm is deduced via coupling the splitting augmented Lagrangian (SAL) and the conjugate gradient (CG) method. With the estimated blur-kernel, the final SR image is reconstructed using a simple TV-based nonblind SR method. The proposed blind SR approach is demonstrated to achieve better performance than [T. Michaeli and M. Irani, Nonparametric Blind Super-resolution, in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vision (IEEE Press, Washington, 2013), pp. 945–952.] in terms of both blur-kernel estimation accuracy and image ehancement quality. In the meanwhile, the experimental results demonstrate surprisingly that the local linear regression-based SR method, anchored neighbor regression (ANR) serves the proposed functional more appropriately than those harnessing the deep convolutional neural networks.