This paper presents a maximum likelihood (ML) identification and restoration method for noisy blurred images. The unitary discrete sine transform (DST) is employed to decouple the large order spatial state-space representation of the noisy blurred image into a bank of one-dimensional real state-space scalar subsystems. By assuming that the noises are Gaussian distributed processes, the maximum likelihood estimation technique using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is developed to jointly identify the blurring functions, the image model parameters and the noise variances. In order to improve the computational efficiency, the conventional Kalman smoother is incorporated to give the estimates. The identification process also yields the estimates of transformed image data, from which the original image is restored by the inverse DST. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority over the recently proposed spatial domain DFT-based methods.

A new type of noncausal stochastic model is proposed to represent a random image with double peak spectrum. The model based on the assumption that the double peak spectrum is expressed by a product of two spectra located at two symmetric positions in the 2D spatial frequency space. Estimation of model parameters is made by means of minimizing the "whiteness" which was proposed in authors' previous work. In a simulation for model estimation we make use of computer-generated random images with double peak spectrum. Comparing this with the estimation by a causal model, we demonstrate that the present method can better estimate not only the spectral peak location but also the spectral shape. The proposed model can be extend to an image model with multl-peak spectrum. However, Increase of parameters makes the model estimation more difficult We try a model with triple peak spectra since a real texture image usually possesses a spectral peak at the origin besides the two peaks. A result shows that the estimation of three spectral positions are good enough, but their spectral shapes are not necessarily satisfactory. It is expected that the estimation of multi-peaked spectral model can be made better by improving the process of minimizing the "whiteness."