A Content-Aware Image Prior

Presented at 2010 IEEE CVPR

Taeg Sang Cho1 Neel Joshi2 C. Lawrence Zitnick2 Sing Bing Kang2 Richard Szeliski2 William T. Freeman1

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2 Microsoft Research

Abstract

In image restoration tasks, the heavy-tailed gradient distribution of natural images has been extensively exploited as an image prior. Most image restoration algorithms impose a sparse gradient prior on the whole image, reconstructing an image with piecewise smooth characteristics. While the sparse gradient prior removes ringing and noise artifacts, it also tends to remove mid-frequency textures, degrading the visual quality. We can attribute such degradations to imposing an incorrect image prior. The gradient profile in fractal-like textures, such as trees, is close to a Gaussian distribution, and the small gradients from such regions are severely penalized by the sparse gradient prior. To address this issue, we introduce an image restoration algorithm that adapts the image prior to the underlying texture. We adapt the prior to both low-level local structures as well as mid-level textural characteristics. Improvements in visual quality is demonstrated on deconvolution and denoising tasks.

Download
  • Paper [link], at 2010 IEEE CVPR
    • @inproceedings{Cho_CVPR2010a,
      author = {Taeg Sang Cho and Neel Joshi and C. Lawrence Zitnick and Sing Bing Kang and Rick Szeliski and William T. Freeman},
      Booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
      Title = {A content-aware image prior},
      Year = {2010}}
  • Experimental results - [html]

Related work

Acknowledgments

This work was mostly done while the first author was an intern at MSR. This research is partially funded by NGA NEGI-1582-04-0004, by ONR-MURI Grant N00014-06-1-0734, and by gift from Microsoft, Google, Adobe. The first author is partially supported by Samsung Scholarship Foundation. Authors would like to thank Wonyoung Kim for being a great model.

Last update: Aug. 18. 2010