I am personally conflicted on this topic. I have recently started to work on machine learning and deep-learning specifically. Therefore, I am keen to explore the usefulness of these technologies, and I hope they will remove bottlenecks from our assays.
My knowledge about CNNs is rather limited, even more so for SR and denoising applications. My first opinion was not very positive. After all, if you do not trust a fellow scientist guessing objects from noisy or undersampled data, why should you trust a piece of software? That appeared to be also the response of many colleagues.
After the machine learning session at FoM, I partially changed opinion, and I am posting this brief -very naïve – opinion after a thread of messages I read on twitter by colleagues. Conceptually, I always thought of machine learning as ‘guessing’ the image, but suddenly I realise that CNNs are perhaps learning a prior or a set of possible priors.
I have mentioned in a previous post about the work by Toraldo di Francia on resolving power and information, often cited by Alberto Diaspro in talks. Di Francia, in his paper, states “The degrees of freedom of an image formed by any real instrument are only a finite number, while those of the object are an infinite number. Several different objects may correspond to the same image. It is shown that in the case of coherent illumination a large class of objects corresponding to a given image can be found very easily. Two-point resolution is impossible unless the observer has a priori an infinite amount of information about the object.”
Are CNNs for image restoration and denoising learning the prior? If so, issues about possible artefacts might be not put aside but at least handled a bit better conceptually by me. The problem would then shift to understand which priors a network is learning and how robust these sets are to typical variations of biological samples.
Great talks today at FoM. Eventually, we will need to have tools to assess the likelihood that an image represents the ground-truth and some simple visual representation that explain what a CNN is doing to a specific image that is restored and ensure good practise. Nothing too different from other techniques, but I feel it is better to deal with these issues earlier rather than later in order to build confidence in the community.
Related twitter thread: https://twitter.com/RetoPaul/status/1118435878270132225?s=19
