Moiré Photo Restoration Using Multiresolution Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Digital cameras and mobile phones enable us to conveniently record precious moments. While digital image quality is constantly being improved, taking high-quality photos of digital screens still remains challenging because the photos are often contaminated with moir\'{e} patterns, a result of the interference between the pixel grids of the camera sensor and the device screen. Moir\'{e} patterns can severely damage the visual quality of photos. However, few studies have aimed to solve this problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel multiresolution fully convolutional network for automatically removing moir\'{e} patterns from photos. Since a moir\'{e} pattern spans over a wide range of frequencies, our proposed network performs a nonlinear multiresolution analysis of the input image before computing how to cancel moir\'{e} artefacts within every frequency band. We also create a large-scale benchmark dataset with $100,000^+$ image pairs for investigating and evaluating moir\'{e} pattern removal algorithms. Our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on this dataset in comparison to existing learning architectures for image restoration problems.