A Multiscale Neural Network Method for Image Restoration

Abstract

This paper describes a novel neural network based multiscale image restoration approach. The method uses a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) trained with synthetic gray level images of artificially degraded co-centered circles. The main difference of the present approach to existing ones relies on the fact that the space relations are used and they are taken from different scales, which makes it possible for the neural network to establish space relations among the considered pixels in the image. This approach attempts at coming up with a simple method that leads to an optimum solution to the problem without the need to establish a priori knowledge of existing noise in the images. The multiscale data is acquired by considering different window sizes around a pixel. The performance of the proposed approach is close to existing restoration techniques but it was observed that the resulting images showed a slight increase in contrast and brightness. The proposed technique is also used as a preprocessing phase in a real-life classification problem of medical Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) by using a fuzzy classification technique.