DeBCR

DeBCR is a Python-based framework for light microscopy data enhancement, including denoising and deconvolution.

As an enhancement core, DeBCR implements a multi-scale sparsity-efficient deep learning model m-rBCR.

As a framework, DeBCR provides user interfaces such as:

• debcr - a Python-based API library for scripting, e.g. using Jupyter Notebook/Lab
• napari-debcr - an add-on GUI plugin for Napari viewer

How to cite us

Li, R., Yushkevich, A., Chu, X., Kudryashev, M. and Yakimovich, A., 2026. DeBCR: a sparsity-efficient framework for image enhancement through a deep-learning-based solution to inverse problems. Communications Engineering.

@article{li2026debcr,
  title={DeBCR: a sparsity-efficient framework for image enhancement through a deep-learning-based solution to inverse problems},
  author={Li, Rui and Yushkevich, Artsemi and Chu, Xiaofeng and Kudryashev, Mikhail and Yakimovich, Artur},
  journal={Communications Engineering},
  year={2026},
  publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
}

License

This is an open-source project and is licensed under MIT license.

Contact

For any questions or bug-reports on debcr please use dedicated GitHub Issue Tracker.

Installation

There are two hardware-based installation options for debcr:

• debcr[tf-gpu] - for a GPU-based trainig and prediction (recommended);
• debcr[tf-cpu] - for a CPU-only execution (note: training on CPUs might be quite slow!).

GPU prerequisites

For a GPU version you need:

• a GPU device with at least 12Gb of VRAM;
• a compatible CUDA Toolkit (recommemded: CUDA-11.7);
• a compatible cuDNN library (recommemded: v8.4.0 for CUDA-11.x from cuDNN archive).

For more info on GPU dependencies please check our GPU-advice page.

Create a package environment (optional)

For a clean isolated installation, we advice using one of Python package environment managers, for example:

• micromamba/mamba (see mamba.readthedocs.io)
• conda-forge (see conda-forge.org)

Create an environment for debcr using

micromamba env create -n debcr python=3.9 -y

and activate it for further installation or usage by

micromamba activate debcr

Install DeBCR

Install one of the DeBCR versions:

• GPU (recommended; backend: TensorFlow-GPU-v2.11):

  pip install 'debcr[tf-gpu]'
  

• CPU (limited; backend: TensorFlow-CPU-v2.11)

  pip install 'debcr[tf-cpu]'
  

Test GPU visibility

For a GPU version installation, it is recommended to check if your GPU device is recognised by TensorFlow using

python -c "import tensorflow as tf; print(tf.config.list_physical_devices('GPU'))"

which for a single GPU device should produce a similar output as below:

[PhysicalDevice(name='/physical_device:GPU:0', device_type='GPU')]

If your GPU device list is empty, please check our GPU-advice page.

Install Jupyter

To use debcr as a Python library (API) interactively, please also install Jupyter Notebook/Lab, for example

pip install jupyterlab

Usage

To learn using debcr as a python library (API) interactively, follow our notebook tutorials:

To use these notebooks,

1. activate debcr environment, if was inactive, by

micromamba activate debcr

2. start Jupyter session at the notebooks location (download them from the DeBCR GitHub)

jupyter-lab

Example data and trained model weights

Based on several previously published datasets (from CARE, DeepBacs, and TA-GAN), we prepared four example datasets and trained m-rBCR model weights to both evaluate our model and serve as the example data/weights for notebook tutorials.

The datasets are distributed as NumPy (.npz) arrays in three essential sets (train, validation and test), available along with the trained model weights on Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.12626121.

About model

The core DeBCR enhancement model m-rBCR approximates imaging process inversion with deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), based on compact BCR-representation (Beylkin G. et al., Comm. Pure Appl. Math, 1991) for convolutions and its DCNN implementation as proposed in BCR-Net (Fan Y. et al., J. Comput. Phys., 2019):

In contrast to the traditional single-stage residual BCR learning process, the core DeBCR model integrates feature maps from multiple resolution levels:

The example of the DeBCR performance on the low/high exposure confocal data of Tribolium castaneum sample from the CARE work (Weigert et al., Nat. Methods, 2018) is shown below:

For more details on the multi-stage residual BCR (m-rBCR) architechture implemented within DeBCR framework see:

Li, R., Kudryashev, M., Yakimovich, A. Solving the Inverse Problem of Microscopy Deconvolution with a Residual Beylkin-Coifman-Rokhlin Neural Network. ECCV 2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15133. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73226-3_22