Zero-Shot Super-Resolution With a Physically-Motivated Downsampling Kernel for Endomicroscopy

Autor: Matthew J. Clarkson, Stephen P. Pereira, Dzhoshkun I. Shakir, Agnieszka Barbara Szczotka, Tom Vercauteren
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
FOS: Computer and information sciences
Computer Science - Machine Learning
Computer science
Image quality
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ComputingMethodologies_IMAGEPROCESSINGANDCOMPUTERVISION
02 engineering and technology
Iterative reconstruction
Convolutional neural network
Article
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
030218 nuclear medicine & medical imaging
Upsampling
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
FOS: Electrical engineering
electronic engineering
information engineering

0202 electrical engineering
electronic engineering
information engineering

Endomicroscopy
Humans
Computer Simulation
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Ground truth
Radiological and Ultrasound Technology
business.industry
Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)
Pattern recognition
Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Image and Video Processing
Computer Science Applications
Kernel (image processing)
020201 artificial intelligence & image processing
Noise (video)
Artificial intelligence
Neural Networks
Computer

business
Software
Zdroj: IEEE Trans Med Imaging
ISSN: 1558-254X
Popis: Super-resolution (SR) methods have seen significant advances thanks to the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CNNs have been successfully employed to improve the quality of endomicroscopy imaging. Yet, the inherent limitation of research on SR in endomicroscopy remains the lack of ground truth high-resolution (HR) images, commonly used for both supervised training and reference-based image quality assessment (IQA). Therefore, alternative methods, such as unsupervised SR are being explored. To address the need for non-reference image quality improvement, we designed a novel zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) approach that relies only on the endomicroscopy data to be processed in a self-supervised manner without the need for ground-truth HR images. We tailored the proposed pipeline to the idiosyncrasies of endomicroscopy by introducing both: a physically-motivated Voronoi downscaling kernel accounting for the endomicroscope's irregular fibre-based sampling pattern, and realistic noise patterns. We also took advantage of video sequences to exploit a sequence of images for self-supervised zero-shot image quality improvement. We run ablation studies to assess our contribution in regards to the downscaling kernel and noise simulation. We validate our methodology on both synthetic and original data. Synthetic experiments were assessed with reference-based IQA, while our results for original images were evaluated in a user study conducted with both expert and non-expert observers. The results demonstrated superior performance in image quality of ZSSR reconstructions in comparison to the baseline method. The ZSSR is also competitive when compared to supervised single-image SR, especially being the preferred reconstruction technique by experts.
Databáze: OpenAIRE