This work identifies and addresses two important technical challenges in single-image super-resolution: (1) how to upsample an image without magnifying noise and (2) how to preserve large scale structure when upsampling. We summarize the techniques we developed for our second place entry in Track 1 (Bicubic Downsampling), seventh place entry in Track 2 (Realistic Adverse Conditions), and seventh place entry in Track 3 (Realistic difficult) in the 2018 NTIRE Super-Resolution Challenge. Furthermore, we present new neural network architectures that specifically address the two challenges listed above: denoising and preservation of large-scale structure.
National Engineering Laboratory for Video Technology, Peking University（北京大学视频技术国家工程实验室）
In this letter, we propose a novel image denoising method based on correlation preserving sparse coding. Because the instable and unreliable correlations among basis set can limit the performance of the dictionary-driven denoising methods, two effective regularized strategies are employed in the coding process. Specifically, a graph-based regularizer is built for preserving the global similarity correlations, which can adaptively capture both the geometrical structures and discriminative features of textured patches. In particular, edge weights in the graph are obtained by seeking a nonnegativ…
University of Athens（雅典大学）；University of Peloponnese（伯罗奔尼撒大学）
The goal of this paper is the development of a novel approach for the problem of Noise Removal, based on the theory of Reproducing Kernels Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). The problem is cast as an optimization task in a RKHS, by taking advantage of the celebrated semiparametric Representer Theorem. Examples verify that in the presence of gaussian noise the proposed method performs relatively well compared to wavelet based technics and outperforms them significantly in the presence of impulse or mixed noise. A more detailed version of this work has been published in the IEEE Trans. Im. Proc. : P. Boubou…
Image textures, as a kind of local variations, provide important information for human visual system. Many image textures, especially the small-scale or stochastic textures are rich in high-frequency variations, and are difficult to be preserved. Current state-of-the-art denoising algorithms typically adopt a nonlocal approach consisting of image patch grouping and group-wise denoising filtering. To achieve a better image denoising while preserving the variations in texture, we first adaptively group high correlated image patches with the same kinds of texture elements (texels) via an adaptive…
Lightweight Data-Free Denoising for Detail-Preserving Biomedical Image Restoration
School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich（计算信息学院，慕尼黑技术大学）；Helmholtz AI, Helmholtz Munich - German Research Center for Environmental Health（海德堡人工智能，海德堡-德国环境健康研究所以及研究中心）；School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London（生物医学工程与成像科学学院，伦敦国王学院）
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油与矿业大学）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
In spite of the improvements achieved by the several denoising algorithms over the years, many of them still fail at preserving the fine details of the image after denoising. This is as a result of the smooth-out effect they have on the images. Most neural network-based algorithms have achieved better quantitative performance than the classical denoising algorithms. However, they also suffer from qualitative (visual) performance as a result of the smooth-out effect. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to address this shortcoming. We propose a deep collaborative filtering-based (Deep-CoFiB) …
Megvii Technology（旷视科技）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
In this paper, we present new data pre-processing and augmentation techniques for DNN-based raw image denoising. Compared with traditional RGB image denoising, performing this task on direct camera sensor readings presents new challenges such as how to effectively handle various Bayer patterns from different data sources, and subsequently how to perform valid data augmentation with raw images. To address the first problem, we propose a Bayer pattern unification (BayerUnify) method to unify different Bayer patterns. This allows us to fully utilize a heterogeneous dataset to train a single denoi…
In this paper, we propose an alternating directional 3D quasi-recurrent neural network for hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising, which can effectively embed the domain knowledge -- structural spatio-spectral correlation and global correlation along spectrum. Specifically, 3D convolution is utilized to extract structural spatio-spectral correlation in an HSI, while a quasi-recurrent pooling function is employed to capture the global correlation along spectrum. Moreover, alternating directional structure is introduced to eliminate the causal dependency with no additional computation cost. The pro…
Image super-resolution and denoising are two important tasks in image processing that can lead to improvement in image quality. Image super-resolution is the task of mapping a low resolution image to a high resolution image whereas denoising is the task of learning a clean image from a noisy input. We propose and train a single deep learning network that we term as SuRDCNN (super-resolution and denoising convolutional neural network), to perform these two tasks simultaneously . Our model nearly replicates the architecture of existing state-of-the-art deep learning models for super-resolution a…
Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
This paper studies the challenging problem of fingerprint image denoising and inpainting. To tackle the challenge of suppressing complicated artifacts (blur, brightness, contrast, elastic transformation, occlusion, scratch, resolution, rotation, and so on) while preserving fine textures, we develop a multi-scale convolutional network, termed U- Finger. Based on the domain expertise, we show that the usage of dilated convolutions as well as the removal of padding have important positive impacts on the final restoration performance, in addition to multi-scale cascaded feature modules. Our model …
Positive2Negative: Breaking the Information-Lossy Barrier in Self-Supervised Single Image Denoising
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学人工智能学院）；Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
The lack of large-scale noisy-clean image pairs restricts supervised denoising methods' deployment in actual applications. While existing unsupervised methods are able to learn image denoising without ground-truth clean images, they either show poor performance or work under impractical settings (e.g., paired noisy images). In this paper, we present a practical unsupervised image denoising method to achieve state-of-the-art denoising performance. Our method only requires single noisy images and a noise model, which is easily accessible in practical raw image denoising. It performs two steps it…
Since convolutional neural networks perform well in learning generalizable image priors from large-scale data, these models have been widely used in image denoising tasks. However, the computational complexity increases dramatically as well on complex model. In this paper, We propose a novel lightweight Complementary Attention Module, which includes a density module and a sparse module, which can cooperatively mine dense and sparse features for feature complementary learning to build an efficient lightweight architecture. Moreover, to reduce the loss of details caused by denoising, this paper …
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学未来技术学院）
Self-supervised blind denoising for Poisson-Gaussian noise remains a challenging task. Pseudo-supervised pairs constructed from single noisy images re-corrupt the signal and degrade the performance. The visible blindspots solve the information loss in masked inputs. However, without explicitly noise sensing, mean square error as an objective function cannot adjust denoising intensities for dynamic noise levels, leading to noticeable residual noise. In this paper, we propose Blind2Sound, a simple yet effective approach to overcome residual noise in denoised images. The proposed adaptive re-visi…
Recently, significant progress has been made on image denoising with strong supervision from large-scale datasets. However, obtaining well-aligned noisy-clean training image pairs for each specific scenario is complicated and costly in practice. Consequently, applying a conventional supervised denoising network on in-the-wild noisy inputs is not straightforward. Although several studies have challenged this problem without strong supervision, they rely on less practical assumptions and cannot be applied to practical situations directly. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a no…
Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Several recent works discussed application-driven image restoration neural networks, which are capable of not only removing noise in images but also preserving their semantic-aware details, making them suitable for various high-level computer vision tasks as the pre-processing step. However, such approaches require extra annotations for their high-level vision tasks, in order to train the joint pipeline using hybrid losses. The availability of those annotations is yet often limited to a few image sets, potentially restricting the general applicability of these methods to denoising more unseen …
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
Accurate recovery of 3D geometrical surfaces from calibrated 2D multi-view images is a fundamental yet active research area in computer vision. Despite the steady progress in multi-view stereo reconstruction, most existing methods are still limited in recovering fine-scale details and sharp features while suppressing noises, and may fail in reconstructing regions with few textures. To address these limitations, this paper presents a Detail-preserving and Content-aware Variational (DCV) multi-view stereo method, which reconstructs the 3D surface by alternating between reprojection error minimiz…
SwinIA: Self-Supervised Blind-Spot Image Denoising without Convolutions
Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu（塔尔图大学计算机科学学院）；CAIRO, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt（维尔茨堡-施韦因富特应用技术大学CAIRO机构）
Self-supervised frameworks that learn denoising models with merely individual noisy images have shown strong capability and promising performance in various image denoising tasks. Existing self-supervised denoising frameworks are mostly built upon the same theoretical foundation, where the denoising models are required to be J-invariant. However, our analyses indicate that the current theory and the J-invariance may lead to denoising models with reduced performance. In this work, we introduce Noise2Same, a novel self-supervised denoising framework. In Noise2Same, a new self-supervised loss is …
Recently, Self-supervised learning methods able to perform image denoising without ground truth labels have been proposed. These methods create low-quality images by adding random or Gaussian noise to images and then train a model for denoising. Ideally, it would be beneficial if one can generate high-quality CT images with only a few training samples via self-supervision. However, the performance of CT denoising is generally limited due to the complexity of CT noise. To address this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised learning-based CT denoising method. In particular, we train pre-tra…
Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学）；Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology（蔚山科学技术院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
Regression that predicts continuous quantity is a central part of applications using computational imaging and computer vision technologies. Yet, studying and understanding self-supervised learning for regression tasks - except for a particular regression task, image denoising - have lagged behind. This paper proposes a general self-supervised regression learning (SSRL) framework that enables learning regression neural networks with only input data (but without ground-truth target data), by using a designable pseudo-predictor that encapsulates domain knowledge of a specific application. The pa…
School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院计算机与通信科学学院）
Super-resolution and denoising are ill-posed yet fundamental image restoration tasks. In blind settings, the degradation kernel or the noise level are unknown. This makes restoration even more challenging, notably for learning-based methods, as they tend to overfit to the degradation seen during training. We present an analysis, in the frequency domain, of degradation-kernel overfitting in super-resolution and introduce a conditional learning perspective that extends to both super-resolution and denoising. Building on our formulation, we propose a stochastic frequency masking of images used in…
Classical image denoising methods utilize the non-local self-similarity principle to effectively recover image content from noisy images. Current state-of-the-art methods use deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to effectively learn the mapping from noisy to clean images. Deep denoising CNNs manifest a high learning capacity and integrate non-local information owing to the large receptive field yielded by numerous cascade of hidden layers. However, deep networks are also computationally complex and require large data for training. To address these issues, this study draws the focus on the…
With the advent of recent advances in unsupervised learning, efficient training of a deep network for image denoising without pairs of noisy and clean images has become feasible. However, most current unsupervised denoising methods are built on the assumption of zero-mean noise under the signal-independent condition. This assumption causes blind denoising techniques to suffer brightness shifting problems on images that are greatly corrupted by extreme noise such as salt-and-pepper noise. Moreover, most blind denoising methods require a random masking scheme for training to ensure the invarianc…
Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；Chosun University（朝鲜大学）
Unpaired image denoising has achieved promising development over the last few years. Regardless of the performance, methods tend to heavily rely on underlying noise properties or any assumption which is not always practical. Alternatively, if we can ground the problem from a structural perspective rather than noise statistics, we can achieve a more robust solution. with such motivation, we propose a self-supervised denoising scheme that is unpaired and relies on spatial degradation followed by a regularized refinement. Our method shows considerable improvement over previous methods and exhibit…
Exploiting network optimization stability for enhanced PET image denoising using deep image prior
Central Research Laboratory, Hamamatsu Photonics K. K.（滨松光子学株式会社中央研究所）；Institute for Quantum Medical Science, National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST)（国立量子科学技术研究开发机构量子医学科学研究所）；J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学J. Crayton Pruitt家族生物医学工程系）
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
In the last few years, image denoising has benefited a lot from the fast development of neural networks. However, the requirement of large amounts of noisy-clean image pairs for supervision limits the wide use of these models. Although there have been a few attempts in training an image denoising model with only single noisy images, existing self-supervised denoising approaches suffer from inefficient network training, loss of useful information, or dependence on noise modeling. In this paper, we present a very simple yet effective method named Neighbor2Neighbor to train an effective image den…
School of Mathematics, Sichuan University（四川大学数学学院）
Deep learning based methods have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in image denoising. In this paper, a deep learning based denoising method is proposed and a module called fusion block is introduced in the convolutional neural network. For this so-called Noise Fusion Convolutional Neural Network (NFCNN), there are two branches in its multi-stage architecture. One branch aims to predict the latent clean image, while the other one predicts the residual image. A fusion block is contained between every two stages by taking the predicted clean image and the predicted residual image as a pa…
FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；Siemens Healthcare GmbH（西门子医疗有限公司）；Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS（弗劳恩霍夫陶瓷技术与系统研究所IKTS）；Ewha Womans University（梨花女子大学）
Self-supervised image denoising techniques emerged as convenient methods that allow training denoising models without requiring ground-truth noise-free data. Existing methods usually optimize loss metrics that are calculated from multiple noisy realizations of similar images, e.g., from neighboring tomographic slices. However, those approaches fail to utilize the multiple contrasts that are routinely acquired in medical imaging modalities like MRI or dual-energy CT. In this work, we propose the new self-supervised training scheme Noise2Contrast that combines information from multiple measured …
University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）
The classic Monte Carlo path tracing can achieve high quality rendering at the cost of heavy computation. Recent works make use of deep neural networks to accelerate this process, by improving either low-resolution or fewer-sample rendering with super-resolution or denoising neural networks in post-processing. However, denoising and super-resolution have only been considered separately in previous work. We show in this work that Monte Carlo path tracing can be further accelerated by joint super-resolution and denoising (SRD) in post-processing. This new type of joint filtering allows only a lo…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Significant progress has been made in self-supervised image denoising (SSID) in the recent few years. However, most methods focus on dealing with spatially independent noise, and they have little practicality on real-world sRGB images with spatially correlated noise. Although pixel-shuffle downsampling has been suggested for breaking the noise correlation, it breaks the original information of images, which limits the denoising performance. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective to solve this problem, i.e., seeking for spatially adaptive supervision for real-world sRGB image denoising. …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Tweedie distributions are a special case of exponential dispersion models, which are often used in classical statistics as distributions for generalized linear models. Here, we reveal that Tweedie distributions also play key roles in modern deep learning era, leading to a distribution independent self-supervised image denoising formula without clean reference images. Specifically, by combining with the recent Noise2Score self-supervised image denoising approach and the saddle point approximation of Tweedie distribution, we can provide a general closed-form denoising formula that can be used fo…
California Polytechnic State University（加州州立理工大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Providence College（普罗维登斯学院）；University of Colorado Colorado Springs（科罗拉多大学科罗拉多斯普林斯分校）
We extend the blindspot model for self-supervised denoising to handle Poisson-Gaussian noise and introduce an improved training scheme that avoids hyperparameters and adapts the denoiser to the test data. Self-supervised models for denoising learn to denoise from only noisy data and do not require corresponding clean images, which are difficult or impossible to acquire in some application areas of interest such as low-light microscopy. We introduce a new training strategy to handle Poisson-Gaussian noise which is the standard noise model for microscope images. Our new strategy eliminates hyper…
Fluorescence microscopy is a key driver to promote discoveries of biomedical research. However, with the limitation of microscope hardware and characteristics of the observed samples, the fluorescence microscopy images are susceptible to noise. Recently, a few self-supervised deep learning (DL) denoising methods have been proposed. However, the training efficiency and denoising performance of existing methods are relatively low in real scene noise removal. To address this issue, this paper proposed self-supervised image denoising method Noise2SR (N2SR) to train a simple and effective image den…
Investigating Self-Supervised Image Denoising with Denaturation
Institute of Science Tokyo（东京科学研究所）；Fujitsu Limited（富士通有限公司）；RIKEN Center for Computational Science（理化学研究所计算科学中心）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Low-dose CT has been a key diagnostic imaging modality to reduce the potential risk of radiation overdose to patient health. Despite recent advances, CNN-based approaches typically apply filters in a spatially invariant way and adopt similar pixel-level losses, which treat all regions of the CT image equally and can be inefficient when fine-grained structures coexist with non-uniformly distributed noises. To address this issue, we propose a Structure-preserving Kernel Prediction Network (StructKPN) that combines the kernel prediction network with a structure-aware loss function that utilizes t…
In this work, we propose a new approach for efficient edge-preserving image deconvolution. Our algorithm is based on a novel type of explicit image filter - guided filter. The guided filter can be used as an edge-preserving smoothing operator like the popular bilateral filter, but has better behaviors near edges. We propose an efficient iterative algorithm with the decouple of deblurring and denoising steps in the restoration process. In deblurring step, we proposed two cost function which could be computed with fast Fourier transform efficiently. The solution of the first one is used as the g…
