  Recently, impressive denoising results have been achieved by Bayesian
approaches which assume Gaussian models for the image patches. This improvement
in performance can be attributed to the use of per-patch models. Unfortunately
such an approach is particularly unstable for most inverse problems beyond
denoising. In this work, we propose the use of a hyperprior to model image
patches, in order to stabilize the estimation procedure. There are two main
advantages to the proposed restoration scheme: Firstly it is adapted to
diagonal degradation matrices, and in particular to missing data problems (e.g.
inpainting of missing pixels or zooming). Secondly it can deal with signal
dependent noise models, particularly suited to digital cameras. As such, the
scheme is especially adapted to computational photography. In order to
illustrate this point, we provide an application to high dynamic range imaging
from a single image taken with a modified sensor, which shows the effectiveness
of the proposed scheme.
