Supervised Learning of Image Restoration with Convolutional Networks

Convolutional networks have achieved a great deal of success in high-level vision problems such as object recognition. Here we show that they can also be used as a general method for low-level image processing. As an example of our approach, convolutional networks are trained using gradient learning to solve the problem of restoring noisy or degraded images. For our training data, we have used electron microscopic images of neural circuitry with ground truth restorations provided by human experts. On this dataset, Markov random field (MRF), conditional random field (CRF), and anisotropic diffusion algorithms perform about the same as simple thresholding, but superior performance is obtained with a convolutional network containing over 34,000 adjustable parameters. When restored by this convolutional network, the images are clean enough to be used for segmentation, whereas the other approaches fail in this respect. We do not believe that convolutional networks are fundamentally superio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Viren Jain, Joseph F. Murray, Fabian Roth, Srinivas C. Turaga, Valentin P. Zhigulin, Kevin L. Briggman, Moritz Helmstaedter, Winfried Denk, H. Sebastian Seung
• Keywords: Anisotropic Diffusion Algorithms, Complex Convolutional Networks, Computer Vision, Conditional Random Field, Convolutional Networks, ICCV 2007, Simple Mrf Models