  Image restoration, including image denoising, super resolution, inpainting,
and so on, is a well-studied problem in computer vision and image processing,
as well as a test bed for low-level image modeling algorithms. In this work, we
propose a very deep fully convolutional auto-encoder network for image
restoration, which is a encoding-decoding framework with symmetric
convolutional-deconvolutional layers. In other words, 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 capture the abstraction of image contents while
eliminating corruptions. Deconvolutional layers have the capability to upsample
the feature maps and recover the image details. To deal with the problem that
deeper networks tend to be more difficult to train, we propose to symmetrically
link convolutional and deconvolutional layers with skip-layer connections, with
which the training converges much faster and attains better results.
