A Model-Driven Deep Unfolding Method for JPEG Artifacts Removal

Deep learning-based methods have achieved notable progress in removing blocking artifacts caused by lossy JPEG compression on images. However, most deep learning-based methods handle this task by designing black-box network architectures to directly learn the relationships between the compressed images and their clean versions. These network architectures are always lack of sufficient interpretability, which limits their further improvements in deblocking performance. To address this issue, in this article, we propose a model-driven deep unfolding method for JPEG artifacts removal, with interpretable network structures. First, we build a maximum posterior (MAP) model for deblocking using convolutional dictionary learning and design an iterative optimization algorithm using proximal operators. Second, we unfold this iterative algorithm into a learnable deep network structure, where each module corresponds to a specific operation of the iterative algorithm. In this way, our network inherits the benefits of both the powerful model ability of data-driven deep learning method and the interpretability of traditional model-driven method. By training the proposed network in an end-to-end manner, all learnable modules can be automatically explored to well characterize the representations of both JPEG artifacts and image content. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method is able to generate competitive or even better deblocking results, compared with state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.