Analysis of Deep Image Prior and Exploiting Self-Guidance for Image Reconstruction

The ability of deep image prior (DIP) to recover high-quality images from incomplete or corrupted measurements has made it popular in inverse problems in image restoration and medical imaging, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, conventional DIP suffers from severe overfitting and spectral bias effects. In this work, we first provide an analysis of how DIP recovers information from undersampled imaging measurements by analyzing the training dynamics of the underlying networks in the kernel regime for different architectures. This study sheds light on important underlying properties for DIP-based recovery. Current research suggests that incorporating a reference image as network input can enhance DIP's performance in image reconstruction compared to using random inputs. However, obtaining suitable reference images requires supervision and raises practical difficulties. In an attempt to overcome this obstacle, we further introduce a self-driven reconstruction process that concurrently optimizes both the network weights and the input while eliminating the need for training data. Our method incorporates a novel denoiser regularization term which enables robust and stable joint estimation of both the network input and reconstructed image. We demonstrate that our self-guided method surpasses both the original DIP and modern supervised methods in terms of MR image reconstruction performance and outperforms previous DIP-based schemes for image inpainting.