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 training to regularize the networks and address the overfitting problem. Our technique improves state-of-the-art methods on blind super-resolution with different synthetic kernels, real super-resolution, blind Gaussian denoising, and real-image denoising.
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…
Deep learning based image denoising methods have been recently popular due to their improved performance. Traditionally, these methods are trained in a supervised manner, requiring a set of noisy input and clean target image pairs. More recently, self-supervised approaches have been proposed to learn denoising from only noisy images. These methods assume that noise across pixels is statistically independent, and the underlying image pixels show spatial correlations across neighborhoods. These methods rely on a masking approach that divides the image pixels into two disjoint sets, where one is …
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）
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）
Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
When capturing and storing images, devices inevitably introduce noise. Reducing this noise is a critical task called image denoising. Deep learning has become the de facto method for image denoising, especially with the emergence of Transformer-based models that have achieved notable state-of-the-art results on various image tasks. However, deep learning-based methods often suffer from a lack of generalization ability. For example, deep models trained on Gaussian noise may perform poorly when tested on other noise distributions. To address this issue, we present a novel approach to enhance the…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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 …
Harbin Institute of Technology at Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Tencent（腾讯）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Restoring the clean background from the superimposed images containing a noisy layer is the common crux of a classical category of tasks on image restoration such as image reflection removal, image deraining and image dehazing. These tasks are typically formulated and tackled individually due to the diverse and complicated appearance patterns of noise layers within the image. In this work we present the Deep-Masking Generative Network (DMGN), which is a unified framework for background restoration from the superimposed images and is able to cope with different types of noise. Our proposed DMGN…
Joint Low-level and High-level Textual Representation Learning with Multiple Masking Strategies
Wenzhou University Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Manufacturing Institute (AIAMI)（温州大学人工智能与先进制造研究院）；Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University（东京东京大学工学研究科）
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…
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…
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 a…
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…
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…
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…
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）
Self-supervised denoising of visual field data improves detection of glaucoma progression
Pepperdine University（佩珀代因大学）；University of California Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Stein Eye Institute（斯坦眼科研究所）；David Geffen School of Medicine（戴维·格芬医学院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of California Riverside（加利福尼亚大学河滨分校）
Image denoising is of great importance for medical imaging system, since it can improve image quality for disease diagnosis and downstream image analyses. In a variety of applications, dynamic imaging techniques are utilized to capture the time-varying features of the subject, where multiple images are acquired for the same subject at different time points. Although signal-to-noise ratio of each time frame is usually limited by the short acquisition time, the correlation among different time frames can be exploited to improve denoising results with shared information across time frames. With t…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院）
In recent years, self-supervised denoising methods have shown impressive performance, which circumvent painstaking collection procedure of noisy-clean image pairs in supervised denoising methods and boost denoising applicability in real world. One of well-known self-supervised denoising strategies is the blind-spot training scheme. However, a few works attempt to improve blind-spot based self-denoiser in the aspect of network architecture. In this paper, we take an intuitive view of blind-spot strategy and consider its process of using neighbor pixels to predict manipulated pixels as an inpain…
Blind-spot network (BSN) and its variants have made significant advances in self-supervised denoising. Nevertheless, they are still bound to synthetic noisy inputs due to less practical assumptions like pixel-wise independent noise. Hence, it is challenging to deal with spatially correlated real-world noise using self-supervised BSN. Recently, pixel-shuffle downsampling (PD) has been proposed to remove the spatial correlation of real-world noise. However, it is not trivial to integrate PD and BSN directly, which prevents the fully self-supervised denoising model on real-world images. We propos…
Although the advances of self-supervised blind denoising are significantly superior to conventional approaches without clean supervision in synthetic noise scenarios, it shows poor quality in real-world images due to spatially correlated noise corruption. Recently, pixel-shuffle downsampling (PD) has been proposed to eliminate the spatial correlation of noise. A study combining a blind spot network (BSN) and asymmetric PD (AP) successfully demonstrated that self-supervised blind denoising is applicable to real-world noisy images. However, PD-based inference may degrade texture details in the t…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Inpainting has recently been proposed as a successful deep learning technique for unsupervised medical image model discovery. The masks used for inpainting are generally independent of the dataset and are not tailored to perform on different given classes of anatomy. In this work, we introduce a method for generating shape-aware masks for inpainting, which aims at learning the statistical shape prior. We hypothesize that although the variation of masks improves the generalizability of inpainting models, the shape of the masks should follow the topology of the organs of interest. Hence, we prop…
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is pervasive in both the research and clinical practice of Ophthalmology. However, OCT images are strongly corrupted by noise, limiting their interpretation. Current OCT denoisers leverage assumptions on noise distributions or generate targets for training deep supervised denoisers via averaging of repeat acquisitions. However, recent self-supervised advances allow the training of deep denoising networks using only repeat acquisitions without clean targets as ground truth, reducing the burden of supervised learning. Despite the clear advantages of self-superv…
We propose an effective deep learning model for signal reconstruction, which requires no signal prior, no noise model calibration, and no clean samples. This model only assumes that the noise is independent of the measurement and that the true signals share the same structured information. We demonstrate its performance on a variety of real-world applications, from sub-Ångström resolution atomic images to sub-arcsecond resolution astronomy images.
Physics-guided deep learning (PG-DL) via algorithm unrolling has received significant interest for improved image reconstruction, including MRI applications. These methods unroll an iterative optimization algorithm into a series of regularizer and data consistency units. The unrolled networks are typically trained end-to-end using a supervised approach. Current supervised PG-DL approaches use all of the available sub-sampled measurements in their data consistency units. Thus, the network learns to fit the rest of the measurements. In this study, we propose to improve the performance and robust…
Recent advancements in Neural Architecture Search(NAS) resulted in finding new state-of-the-art Artificial Neural Network (ANN) solutions for tasks like image classification, object detection, or semantic segmentation without substantial human supervision. In this paper, we focus on exploring NAS for a dense prediction task that is image denoising. Due to a costly training procedure, most NAS solutions for image enhancement rely on reinforcement learning or evolutionary algorithm exploration, which usually take weeks (or even months) to train. Therefore, we introduce a new efficient implementa…
SABILab（SABI实验室）；École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Laboratoire de mathématiques d’Orsay（奥赛数学实验室）；Laboratoire J. A. Dieudonné（J·A·迪厄多内实验室）；Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；Télécom SudParis（南巴黎电信学院）
We propose a novel self-supervised image blind denoising approach in which two neural networks jointly predict the clean signal and infer the noise distribution. Assuming that the noisy observations are independent conditionally to the signal, the networks can be jointly trained without clean training data. Therefore, our approach is particularly relevant for biomedical image denoising where the noise is difficult to model precisely and clean training data are usually unavailable. Our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art self-supervised blind denoising algorithms, on six p…
