Using Powerful Prior Knowledge of Diffusion Model in Deep Unfolding Networks for Image Compressive Sensing

Abstract: Recently, Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) have achieved impressive reconstruction quality in the field of image Compressive Sensing (CS) by unfolding iterative optimization algorithms into neural networks. The reconstruction quality of DUNs depends on the learned prior knowledge, so introducing stronger prior knowledge can further improve reconstruction quality. On the other hand, pre-trained diffusion models contain powerful prior knowledge and have a solid theoretical foundation and strong scalability, but it requires a large number of iterative steps to achieve reconstruction. In this paper, we propose to use the powerful prior knowledge of pre-trained diffusion model in DUNs to achieve high-quality reconstruction with less steps for image CS. Specifically, we first design an iterative optimization algorithm named Diffusion Message Passing (DMP), which embeds a pre-trained diffusion model into each iteration process of DMP. Then, we deeply unfold the DMP algorithm into a neural network named DMP-DUN. The proposed DMP-DUN can use lightweight neural networks to achieve mapping from measurement data to the intermediate steps of the reverse diffusion process and directly approximate the divergence of the diffusion model, thereby further improving reconstruction efficiency. Extensive experiments show that our proposed DMP-DUN achieves state-of-the-art performance and requires at least only 2 steps to reconstruct the image. Codes are available at https://github.com/FengodChen/DMP-DUN-CVPR2025.