A Primal Dual Network for Low-Level Vision Problems

In the past, classic energy optimization techniques were the driving force in many innovations and are a building block for almost any problem in computer vision. Efficient algorithms are mandatory to achieve real-time processing, needed in many applications like autonomous driving. However, energy models - even if designed by human experts - might never be able to fully capture the complexity of natural scenes and images. Similar to optimization techniques, Deep Learning has changed the landscape of computer vision in recent years and has helped to push the performance of many models to never experienced heights.
Our idea of a primal-dual network is to combine the structure of regular energy optimization techniques, in particular of first order methods, with the flexibility of Deep Learning to adapt to the statistics of the input data.