Robust Self-Guided Deep Image Prior

In this work, we study the deep image prior (DIP) for reconstruction problems in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). DIP has become a popular approach for image reconstruction, where it recovers the clear image by fitting an overparameterized convolutional neural network (CNN) to the corrupted/undersampled measurements. To improve the performance of DIP, recent work shows that using a reference image as an input often leads to improved reconstruction results compared to vanilla DIP with random input. However, obtaining the reference input image often requires supervision and hence is difficult in practice. In this work, we propose a self-guided reconstruction scheme that uses no training data other than the set of undersampled measurements to simultaneously estimate the network weights and input (reference). We introduce a new regularization that aids the joint estimation by requiring the CNN to act as a powerful denoiser. The proposed self-guided method gives significantly improved image reconstructions for MRI with limited measurements compared to the conventional DIP and the reference-guided method while eliminating the need for any additional data.