Poisson-Gaussian noise describes the noise of various imaging systems thus
the need of efficient algorithms for Poisson-Gaussian image restoration. Deep
learning methods offer state-of-the-art performance but often require
sensor-specific training when used in a supervised setting. A promising
alternative is given by plug-and-play (PnP) methods, which consist in learning
only a regularization through a denoiser, allowing to restore images from
several sources with the same network. This paper introduces PG-DPIR, an
efficient PnP method for high-count Poisson-Gaussian inverse problems, adapted
from DPIR. While DPIR is designed for white Gaussian noise, a naive adaptation
to Poisson-Gaussian noise leads to prohibitively slow algorithms due to the
absence of a closed-form proximal operator. To address this, we adapt DPIR for
the specificities of Poisson-Gaussian noise and propose in particular an
efficient initialization of the gradient descent required for the proximal step
that accelerates convergence by several orders of magnitude. Experiments are
conducted on satellite image restoration and super-resolution problems.
High-resolution realistic Pleiades images are simulated for the experiments,
which demonstrate that PG-DPIR achieves state-of-the-art performance with
improved efficiency, which seems promising for on-ground satellite processing
chains.