LSDIR: A Large Scale Dataset for Image Restoration.

The aim of this paper is to propose a large scale dataset for image restoration (LSDIR). Recent work in image restoration has been focused on the design of deep neural networks. The datasets used to train these networks ‘only’ contain some thousands of images, which is still incomparable with the large scale datasets for other vision tasks such as visual recognition and object detection. The small training set limits the performance of image restoration networks. To solve this problem, we collect high-resolution (HR) images from Flickr for image restoration. To ensure the pixel-level quality of the collected dataset, annotators were invited to manually inspect each of the collected image and remove the low-quality ones. The final dataset contains 84,991 high-quality training images, 1,000 validation images, and 1,000 test images. In addition, we showed that the model capacity of large networks could be fully exploited by training on the large scale dataset with significantly increased patch size and prolonged training iterations. The experimental results on image super-resolution (SR), denoising, JPEG deblocking, deblurring, and demosaicking, and real-world SR show that image restoration networks benefit a lot from the large scale dataset.