Bayesian Restoration of Digital Images Employing Markov Chain Monte Carlo a Review

We develop a statistical-mechanical formulation for image restoration and error-correcting codes. These problems are shown to be equivalent to the Ising spin glass with ferromagnetic bias under random external fields. We prove that the quality of restoration/decoding is maximized at a specific set of parameter values determined by the source and channel properties. For image restoration in mean-field system a line of optimal performance is shown to exist in the parameter spac...

In this paper, a methodology is investigated for signal recovery in the presence of non-Gaussian noise. In contrast with regularized minimization approaches often adopted in the literature, in our algorithm the regularization parameter is reliably estimated from the observations. As the posterior density of the unknown parameters is analytically intractable, the estimation problem is derived in a variational Bayesian framework where the goal is to provide a good approximation...

We propose a method to restore and to segment simultaneously images degraded by a known point spread function (PSF) and additive white noise. For this purpose, we propose a joint Bayesian estimation framework, where a family of non-homogeneous Gauss-Markov fields with Potts region labels models are chosen to serve as priors for images. Since neither the joint maximum a posteriori estimator nor posterior mean one are tractable, the joint posterior law of the image, its segment...

Bayesian statistics is a cornerstone of imaging sciences, underpinning many and varied approaches from Markov random fields to score-based denoising diffusion models. In addition to powerful image estimation methods, the Bayesian paradigm also provides a framework for uncertainty quantification and for using image data as quantitative evidence. These probabilistic capabilities are important for the rigorous interpretation of experimental results and for robust interfacing of ...

Almost all existing methods for image restoration are based on optimizing the mean squared error (MSE), even though it is known that the best estimate in terms of MSE may yield a highly atypical image due to the fact that there are many plausible restorations for a given noisy image. In this paper, we show how to combine explicit priors on patches of natural images in order to sample from the posterior probability of a full image given a degraded image. We prove that our algo...

Image denoising is a well-known and well studied problem, commonly targeting a minimization of the mean squared error (MSE) between the outcome and the original image. Unfortunately, especially for severe noise levels, such Minimum MSE (MMSE) solutions may lead to blurry output images. In this work we propose a novel stochastic denoising approach that produces viable and high perceptual quality results, while maintaining a small MSE. Our method employs Langevin dynamics that ...

In this work we propose a Bayesian framework for data fusion of multivariate signals which arises in imaging systems. More specifically, we consider the case where we have observed two images of the same object through two different imaging processes. The objective of this work is then to propose a coherent approach to combine these data sets to obtain a segmented image which can be considered as the fusion result of these two images. The proposed approach is based on a Hidde...

This paper tackles the problem of image deconvolution with joint estimation of PSF parameters and hyperparameters. Within a Bayesian framework, the solution is inferred via a global a posteriori law for unknown parameters and object. The estimate is chosen as the posterior mean, numerically calculated by means of a Monte-Carlo Markov chain algorithm. The estimates are efficiently computed in the Fourier domain and the effectiveness of the method is shown on simulated examples...

This paper studies a new and highly efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methodology to perform Bayesian inference in low-photon imaging problems, with particular attention to situations involving observation noise processes that deviate significantly from Gaussian noise, such as binomial, geometric and low-intensity Poisson noise. These problems are challenging for many reasons. From an inferential viewpoint, low-photon numbers lead to severe identifiability issues, poo...

Bayesian image restoration has had a long history of successful application but one of the limitations that has prevented more widespread use is that the methods are generally computationally intensive. The authors recently addressed this issue by developing a method that performs the image enhancement in an orthogonal space (Fourier space in that case) which effectively transforms the problem from a large multivariate optimization problem to a set of smaller independent univ...