Compressive imaging (CI) consists of reconstructing images from incomplete observed data. The reconstruction process involves solving an ill-posed inverse problem which is highly dependent on the number of real measurements, with a greater number of measurements typically leading to more accurate reconstructions. Due to their ability to learn data distributions, diffusion models (DM) have emerged as promising techniques for various inverse problems. Mainly, DMs solve inverse problems by conditioning the generation process to the acquired measurements. In this work, we introduce a new approach to improve this conditioning by exploiting synthetic measurements, which come from a synthetic sensing matrix. Synthetic measurements are estimated from real data via a neural network. The combined real and synthetic measurements form an augmented set, which is input into the conditional DM to enhance reconstruction capacity. Computational experiments demonstrate that augmenting measurements with the conditional DM improves performance compared to using only real measurements.

In compressive imaging systems, the scene is acquired via linear coded noisy projections, known as measurements, requiring a recovery process to estimate the underlying signal. This recovery is inherently ill-posed, posing a challenge for accurate signal recovery. Existing methods that employ prior information about the signal often fail in practical scenarios. In this work, instead of developing a new prior over the signal, we exploit the structure of the low-dimensional measurements to synthesize an augmented measurement set that can be used in various recovery methods to improve its performance. We used a deep neural network to generate the synthetic measurements from the acquired data. We show the benefits of this approach in two schemes, deep learning-based recovery and the plug-and-play (PnP) algorithm. Particularly, our method is interpreted as a non-linear preconditioning technique for the PnP algorithm. We show improved performance for different sensing matrices.

In computational optical imaging and wireless communications, signals are acquired through linear coded and noisy projections, which are recovered through computational algorithms. Deep model-based approaches, i.e., neural networks incorporating the sensing operators, are the state-of-the-art for signal recovery. However, these methods require exact knowledge of the sensing operator, which is often unavailable in practice, leading to performance degradation. Consequently, we propose a new recovery paradigm based on knowledge distillation. A teacher model, trained with full or almost exact knowledge of a synthetic sensing operator, guides a student model with an inexact real sensing operator. The teacher is interpreted as a relaxation of the student since it solves a problem with fewer constraints, which can guide the student to achieve higher performance. We demonstrate the improvement of signal reconstruction in computational optical imaging for single-pixel imaging with miscalibrated coded apertures systems and multiple-input multiple-output symbols detection with inexact channel matrix.

Phase retrieval (PR) reconstructs phase information from magnitude measurements, known as coded diffraction patterns (CDPs), whose quality depends on the number of snap-shots captured using coded phase masks. High-quality phase estimation requires multiple snapshots, which is not desired for efficient PR systems. End-to-end frameworks enable joint optimization of the optical system and the recovery neural network. However, their application is constrained by physical implementation limitations. Additionally, the framework is prone to gradient vanishing issues related to its global optimization process. This paper introduces a Knowledge Distillation (KD) optimization approach to address these limitations. KD transfers knowledge from a larger, lower-constrained network (teacher) to a smaller, more efficient, and implementable network (student). In this method, the teacher, a PR system trained with multiple snapshots, distills its knowledge into a single-snapshot PR system, the student. The loss functions compare the CPMs and the feature space of the recovery network. Simulations demonstrate that this approach improves reconstruction performance compared to a PR system trained without the teacher’s guidance.

Imaging inverse problems aim to recover high-dimensional signals from undersampled, noisy measurements, a fundamentally ill-posed task with infinite solutions in the null-space of the sensing operator. To resolve this ambiguity, prior information is typically incorporated through handcrafted regularizers or learned models that constrain the solution space. However, these priors typically ignore the task-specific structure of that null-space. In this work, we propose Non-Linear Projections of the Null-Space (NPN), a novel class of regularization that, instead of enforcing structural constraints in the image domain, promotes solutions that lie in a low-dimensional projection of the sensing matrix's null-space with a neural network. Our approach has two key advantages: (1) Interpretability: by focusing on the structure of the null-space, we design sensing-matrix-specific priors that capture information orthogonal to the signal components that are fundamentally blind to the sensing process. (2) Flexibility: NPN is adaptable to various inverse problems, compatible with existing reconstruction frameworks, and complementary to conventional image-domain priors. We provide theoretical guarantees on convergence and reconstruction accuracy when used within plug-and-play methods. Empirical results across diverse sensing matrices demonstrate that NPN priors consistently enhance reconstruction fidelity in various imaging inverse problems, such as compressive sensing, deblurring, super-resolution, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging, with plug-and-play methods, unrolling networks, deep image prior, and diffusion models.

Computational optical imaging (COI) systems have enabled the acquisition of high-dimensional signals through optical coding elements (OCEs). OCEs encode the high-dimensional signal in one or more snapshots, which are subsequently decoded using computational algorithms. Currently, COI systems are optimized through an end-to-end (E2E) approach, where the OCEs are modeled as a layer of a neural network and the remaining layers perform a specific imaging task. However, the performance of COI systems optimized through E2E is limited by the physical constraints imposed by these systems. This paper proposes a knowledge distillation (KD) framework for the design of highly physically constrained COI systems. This approach employs the KD methodology, which consists of a teacher-student relationship, where a high-performance, unconstrained COI system (the teacher), guides the optimization of a physically constrained system (the student) characterized by a limited number of snapshots. We validate the proposed approach, using a binary coded apertures single pixel camera for monochromatic and multispectral image reconstruction. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the KD scheme over traditional E2E optimization for the designing of highly physically constrained COI systems.

Seismic data interpolation of irregularly missing traces plays a crucial role in subsurface imaging, enabling accurate analysis and interpretation throughout the seismic processing workflow. Despite the widespread exploration of deep supervised learning methods for seismic data reconstruction, several challenges remain. Particularly, the requirement for extensive training data and poor domain generalization due to the seismic survey’s variability pose significant issues. To overcome these limitations, this article introduces a deep-learning-based seismic data reconstruction approach that leverages data redundancy. This method involves a two-stage training process. First, an adversarial generative network is trained using synthetic seismic data, enabling the extraction and learning of their primary and local seismic characteristics. Second, a reconstruction network is trained with synthetic data generated by the generative adversarial network (GAN), which dynamically adjusts the distortion level at each epoch to promote feature diversity. This approach enhances the generalization capabilities of the reconstruction network by allowing control over the generation of seismic patterns from the latent space of the GAN, thereby reducing the dependency on large seismic databases. Experimental results on field and synthetic seismic datasets, both pre-stack and post-stack, show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline supervised learning and unsupervised approaches, such as deep seismic prior (DSP) and internal learning (IL), by up to 8 dB of PSNR.