Title: Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration,
Abstract: Model-based optimization methods and discriminative learning methods have
been the two dominant strategies for solving various inverse problems in
low-level vision. Typically, those two kinds of methods have their respective
merits and drawbacks, e.g., model-based optimization methods are flexible for
handling different inverse problems but are usually time-consuming with
sophisticated priors for the purpose of good performance; in the meanwhile,
discriminative learning methods have fast testing speed but their application
range is greatly restricted by the specialized task. Recent works have revealed
that, with the aid of variable splitting techniques, denoiser prior can be
plugged in as a modular part of model-based optimization methods to solve other
inverse problems (e.g., deblurring). Such an integration induces considerable
advantage when the denoiser is obtained via discriminative learning. However,
the study of integration with fast discriminative denoiser prior is still
lacking. To this end, this paper aims to train a set of fast and effective CNN
(convolutional neural network) denoisers and integrate them into model-based
optimization method to solve other inverse problems. Experimental results
demonstrate that the learned set of denoisers not only achieve promising
Gaussian denoising results but also can be used as prior to deliver good
performance for various low-level vision applications.