No Arabic abstract
The effectiveness of existing denoising algorithms typically relies on accurate pre-defined noise statistics or plenty of paired data, which limits their practicality. In this work, we focus on denoising in the more common case where noise statistics and paired data are unavailable. Considering that denoising CNNs require supervision, we develop a new textbf{adaptive noise imitation (ADANI)} algorithm that can synthesize noisy data from naturally noisy images. To produce realistic noise, a noise generator takes unpaired noisy/clean images as input, where the noisy image is a guide for noise generation. By imposing explicit constraints on the type, level and gradient of noise, the output noise of ADANI will be similar to the guided noise, while keeping the original clean background of the image. Coupling the noisy data output from ADANI with the corresponding ground-truth, a denoising CNN is then trained in a fully-supervised manner. Experiments show that the noisy data produced by ADANI are visually and statistically similar to real ones so that the denoising CNN in our method is competitive to other networks trained with external paired data.
Previous works have shown that convolutional neural networks can achieve good performance in image denoising tasks. However, limited by the local rigid convolutional operation, these methods lead to oversmoothing artifacts. A deeper network structure could alleviate these problems, but more computational overhead is needed. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-adaptive denoising network (SADNet) for efficient single image blind noise removal. To adapt to changes in spatial textures and edges, we design a residual spatial-adaptive block. Deformable convolution is introduced to sample the spatially correlated features for weighting. An encoder-decoder structure with a context block is introduced to capture multiscale information. With noise removal from the coarse to fine, a high-quality noisefree image can be obtained. We apply our method to both synthetic and real noisy image datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can surpass the state-of-the-art denoising methods both quantitatively and visually.
The accuracy of medical imaging-based diagnostics is directly impacted by the quality of the collected images. A passive approach to improve image quality is one that lags behind improvements in imaging hardware, awaiting better sensor technology of acquisition devices. An alternative, active strategy is to utilize prior knowledge of the imaging system to directly post-process and improve the acquired images. Traditionally, priors about the image properties are taken into account to restrict the solution space. However, few techniques exploit the prior about the noise properties. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based model for disentangling the signal and noise components of an input noisy image, without the need for any ground truth training data. We design a unified loss function that encodes priors about signal as well as noise estimate in the form of regularization terms. Specifically, by using total variation and piecewise constancy priors along with noise whiteness priors such as auto-correlation and stationary losses, our network learns to decouple an input noisy image into the underlying signal and noise components. We compare our proposed method to Noise2Noise and Noise2Self, as well as non-local mean and BM3D, on three public confocal laser endomicroscopy datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our network compared to state-of-the-art in terms of PSNR and SSIM.
Fully supervised deep-learning based denoisers are currently the most performing image denoising solutions. However, they require clean reference images. When the target noise is complex, e.g. composed of an unknown mixture of primary noises with unknown intensity, fully supervised solutions are limited by the difficulty to build a suited training set for the problem. This paper proposes a gradual denoising strategy that iteratively detects the dominating noise in an image, and removes it using a tailored denoiser. The method is shown to keep up with state of the art blind denoisers on mixture noises. Moreover, noise analysis is demonstrated to guide denoisers efficiently not only on noise type, but also on noise intensity. The method provides an insight on the nature of the encountered noise, and it makes it possible to extend an existing denoiser with new noise nature. This feature makes the method adaptive to varied denoising cases.
Image denoising is the process of removing noise from noisy images, which is an image domain transferring task, i.e., from a single or several noise level domains to a photo-realistic domain. In this paper, we propose an effective image denoising method by learning two image priors from the perspective of domain alignment. We tackle the domain alignment on two levels. 1) the feature-level prior is to learn domain-invariant features for corrupted images with different level noise; 2) the pixel-level prior is used to push the denoised images to the natural image manifold. The two image priors are based on $mathcal{H}$-divergence theory and implemented by learning classifiers in adversarial training manners. We evaluate our approach on multiple datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for robust image denoising on both synthetic and real-world noisy images. Furthermore, we show that the feature-level prior is capable of alleviating the discrepancy between different level noise. It can be used to improve the blind denoising performance in terms of distortion measures (PSNR and SSIM), while pixel-level prior can effectively improve the perceptual quality to ensure the realistic outputs, which is further validated by subjective evaluation.
Denoising extreme low light images is a challenging task due to the high noise level. When the illumination is low, digital cameras increase the ISO (electronic gain) to amplify the brightness of captured data. However, this in turn amplifies the noise, arising from read, shot, and defective pixel sources. In the raw domain, read and shot noise are effectively modelled using Gaussian and Poisson distributions respectively, whereas defective pixels can be modeled with impulsive noise. In extreme low light imaging, noise removal becomes a critical challenge to produce a high quality, detailed image with low noise. In this paper, we propose a multi-task deep neural network called Noise Decomposition (NODE) that explicitly and separately estimates defective pixel noise, in conjunction with Gaussian and Poisson noise, to denoise an extreme low light image. Our network is purposely designed to work with raw data, for which the noise is more easily modeled before going through non-linear transformations in the image signal processing (ISP) pipeline. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation show the proposed method to be more effective at denoising real raw images than state-of-the-art techniques.