  In this paper, we propose a very deep fully convolutional encoding-decoding
framework for image restoration such as denoising and super-resolution. The
network is composed of multiple layers of convolution and de-convolution
operators, learning end-to-end mappings from corrupted images to the original
ones. The convolutional layers act as the feature extractor, which capture the
abstraction of image contents while eliminating noises/corruptions.
De-convolutional layers are then used to recover the image details. We propose
to symmetrically link convolutional and de-convolutional layers with skip-layer
connections, with which the training converges much faster and attains a
higher-quality local optimum. First, The skip connections allow the signal to
be back-propagated to bottom layers directly, and thus tackles the problem of
gradient vanishing, making training deep networks easier and achieving
restoration performance gains consequently. Second, these skip connections pass
image details from convolutional layers to de-convolutional layers, which is
beneficial in recovering the original image. Significantly, with the large
capacity, we can handle different levels of noises using a single model.
Experimental results show that our network achieves better performance than all
previously reported state-of-the-art methods.
