Mask-Pix2Pix Network for Overexposure Region Recovery of Solar Image

Overexposure may happen for imaging of solar observation as extremely violet solar bursts occur, which means that signal intensity goes beyond the dynamic range of imaging system of a telescope, resulting in loss of signal. For example, during solar flare, Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) of Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) often records overexposed images/videos, resulting loss of fine structures of solar flare. This paper makes effort to retrieve/recover missing information of overexposure by exploiting deep learning for its powerful nonlinear representation which makes it widely used in image reconstruction/restoration. First, a new model, namely, mask-Pix2Pix network, is proposed for overexposure recovery. It is built on a well-known Pix2Pix network of conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). In addition, a hybrid loss function, including an adversarial loss, a masked L1 loss and a edge mass loss/smoothness, are integrated together for addressing challenges of overexposure relative to conventional image restoration. Moreover, a new database of overexposure is established for training the proposed model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mask-Pix2Pix network can well recover missing information of overexposure and outperforms the state of the arts originally designed for image reconstruction tasks.