Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is a fundamental task in remote sensing image processing, which is helpful for HSI subsequent applications, such as unmixing and classification. Thanks to the powerful representation ability of untrained deep neural networks, deep image prior (DIP)-based methods achieve tremendous successes in image processing (e.g., denoising and inpainting). However, DIP-based methods neglect the tensor low-rank prior of the underlying HSI which will be beneficial to capturing the global structure of the underlying HSI. To address this issue, we propose a novel model for HSI denoising, which can simultaneously take respective advantages of the tensor low-rank prior and the deep spatial-spectral prior. The tensor low-rank prior leads to a better global structure and the deep spatial-spectral prior is complementary to preserve better local details. On the one hand, we adopt low-rank tensor ring (TR) decomposition to characterize the tensor low-rank prior and capture the global structure of the underlying HSI. On the other hand, we employ untrained deep neural networks to flexibly represent the deep spatial-spectral prior and capture the local details of the underlying HSI. To solve the proposed model, we develop an efficient alternating minimization algorithm. Experimental results on simulated and real data validate the advantages of the proposed model in HSI denoising. Compared with state-of-the-art HSI denoising methods, the proposed method preserves better local details and the global structure of the underlying HSI.

As a preprocessing step, hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration plays a critical role in many subsequent applications. Recently, based on the framework of subspace representation and low-rank matrix/tensor factorization (LRMF/LRTF), many single-factor-regularized methods add various regularizations on the spatial factor to characterize its spatial prior knowledge. However, these methods neglect the common characteristics among different bands and the spectral continuity of HSIs. To tackle this issue, this article establishes a bridge between the factor-based regularization and the HSI priors and proposes a double-factor-regularized LRTF model for HSI mixed noise removal. The proposed model employs LRTF to characterize the spectral global low rankness, introduces a weighted group sparsity constraint on the spatial difference images (SpatDIs) of the spatial factor to promote the group sparsity in the SpatDIs of HSIs, and suggests a continuity constraint on the spectral factor to promote the spectral continuity of HSIs. Moreover, we develop a proximal alternating minimization-based algorithm to solve the proposed model. Extensive experiments conducted on the simulated and real HSIs demonstrate that the proposed method has superior performance on mixed noise removal compared with the state-of-the-art methods based on subspace representation, noise modeling, and LRMF/LRTF.

Image denoising is often empowered by accurate prior information. In recent years, data-driven neural network priors have shown promising performance for RGB natural image denoising. Compared to classic handcrafted priors (e.g., sparsity and total variation), the “deep priors” are learned using a large number of training samples, which can accurately model the complex image generating process. However, data-driven priors are hard to acquire for hyperspectral images (HSIs) due to the lack of training data. A remedy is to use the so-called unsupervised deep image prior (DIP). Under the unsupervised DIP framework, it is hypothesized and empirically demonstrated that proper neural network structures are reasonable priors of certain types of images, and the network weights can be learned without training data. Nonetheless, the most effective unsupervised DIP structures were proposed for natural images instead of HSIs. The performance of unsupervised DIP-based HSI denoising is limited by a couple of serious challenges, namely network structure design and network complexity. This work puts forth an unsupervised DIP framework that is based on the classic spatiospectral decomposition of HSIs. Utilizing the so-called linear mixture model of HSIs, two types of unsupervised DIPs, that is, U-Net-like network and fully connected networks, are employed to model the abundance maps and endmembers contained in the HSIs, respectively. This way, empirically validated unsupervised DIP structures for natural images can be easily incorporated for HSI denoising. Besides, the decomposition also substantially reduces network complexity. An efficient alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to handle the formulated denoising problem. Simulated and real data experiments are employed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach.