For flexible non-blind image denoising, existing deep networks usually take both noisy image and noise level map as the input to handle various noise levels with a single model. However, in this kind of solution, the noise variance (i.e., noise level) is only deployed to modulate the first layer of convolution feature with channel-wise shifting, which is limited in balancing noise removal and detail preservation. In this paper, we present a novel flexible image enoising network (CFMNet) by equipping an U-Net backbone with multi-layer conditional feature modulation (CFM) modules. In comparison to channel-wise shifting only in the first layer, CFMNet can make better use of noise level information by deploying multiple layers of CFM. Moreover, each CFM module takes onvolutional features from both noisy image and noise level map as input for better trade-off between noise removal and detail preservation. Experimental results show that our CFMNet is effective in exploiting noise level information for flexible non-blind denoising, and performs favorably against the existing deep image denoising methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.
Fast and flexible processing are two essential requirements for a number of practical applications of image denoising. Current state-of-the-art methods, however, still require either high computational cost or limited scopes of the target. We introduce an efficient ensemble network trained via a competition of expert networks, as an application for image blind denoising. We realize automatic division of unlabeled noisy datasets into clusters respectively optimized to enhance denoising performance. The architecture is scalable, can be extended to deal with diverse noise sources/levels without i…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Due to the fast inference and good performance, discriminative learning methods have been widely studied in image denoising. However, these methods mostly learn a specific model for each noise level, and require multiple models for denoising images with different noise levels. They also lack flexibility to deal with spatially variant noise, limiting their applications in practical denoising. To address these issues, we present a fast and flexible denoising convolutional neural network, namely FFDNet, with a tunable noise level map as the input. The proposed FFDNet works on downsampled sub-imag…
Image restoration has been an extensively researched topic in numerous fields. With the advent of deep learning, a lot of the current algorithms were replaced by algorithms that are more flexible and robust. Deep networks have demonstrated impressive performance in a variety of tasks like blind denoising, image enhancement, deblurring, super-resolution, inpainting, among others. Most of these learning-based algorithms use a large amount of clean data during the training process. However, in certain applications in medical image processing, one may not have access to a large amount of clean dat…
Image denoising is a typical ill-posed problem due to complex degradation. Leading methods based on normalizing flows have tried to solve this problem with an invertible transformation instead of a deterministic mapping. However, the implicit bijective mapping is not explored well. Inspired by a latent observation that noise tends to appear in the high-frequency part of the image, we propose a fully invertible denoising method that injects the idea of disentangled learning into a general invertible neural network to split noise from the high-frequency part. More specifically, we decompose the …
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；Heilongjiang Academy of Sciences（黑龙江省科学院）
Owing to flexible architectures of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), CNNs are successfully used for image denoising. However, they suffer from the following drawbacks: (i) deep network architecture is very difficult to train. (ii) Deeper networks face the challenge of performance saturation. In this study, the authors propose a novel method called enhanced convolutional neural denoising network (ECNDNet). Specifically, they use residual learning and batch normalisation techniques to address the problem of training difficulties and accelerate the convergence of the network. In addition…
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院麻省总医院戈登医学成像中心）；Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院麻省总医院高级医学计算与分析中心）；University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center（德克萨斯大学MD安德森癌症中心）
Due to various physical degradation factors and limited counts received, PET image quality needs further improvements. The denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) are distribution learning-based models, which try to transform a normal distribution into a specific data distribution based on iterative refinements. In this work, we proposed and evaluated different DDPM-based methods for PET image denoising. Under the DDPM framework, one way to perform PET image denoising is to provide the PET image and/or the prior image as the network input. Another way is to supply the prior image as th…
Tampere Universities（坦佩雷大学）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently become a favored technique for image denoising due to its adaptive learning ability, especially with a deep configuration. However, their efficacy is inherently limited owing to their homogenous network formation with the unique use of linear convolution. In this study, we propose a heterogeneous network model which allows greater flexibility for embedding additional non-linearity at the core of the data transformation. To this end, we propose the idea of an operational neuron or Operational Neural Networks (ONN), which enables a flexible non-…
YOND: Practical Blind Raw Image Denoising Free from Camera-Specific Data Dependency
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（计算机科学与技术学院，北京理工大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University（人工智能学院，北京师范大学）
University of Torontoland（多伦多兰大学）；Googol ShallowMind（谷歌浅智）
Low rank matrix approximation (LRMA) has drawn increasing attention in recent years, due to its wide range of applications in computer vision and machine learning. However, LRMA, achieved by nuclear norm minimization (NNM), tends to over-shrink the rank components with the same threshold and ignore the differences between rank components. To address this problem, we propose a flexible and precise model named multi-band weighted $l_p$ norm minimization (MBWPNM). The proposed MBWPNM not only gives more accurate approximation with a Schatten $p$-norm, but also considers the prior knowledge where …
College of Computer Science Chongqing University（重庆大学计算机学院）
Image denoising is a classical problem in low level computer vision. Model-based optimization methods and deep learning approaches have been the two main strategies for solving the problem. Model-based optimization methods are flexible for handling different inverse problems but are usually time-consuming. In contrast, deep learning methods have fast testing speed but the performance of these CNNs is still inferior. To address this issue, here we propose a novel deep residual learning model that combines the dilated residual convolution and multi-scale convolution groups. Due to the complex pa…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Most existing image denoising approaches assumed the noise to be homogeneous white Gaussian distributed with known intensity. However, in real noisy images, the noise models are usually unknown beforehand and can be much more complex. This paper addresses this problem and proposes a novel blind image denoising algorithm to recover the clean image from noisy one with the unknown noise model. To model the empirical noise of an image, our method introduces the mixture of Gaussian distribution, which is flexible enough to approximate different continuous distributions. The problem of blind image d…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) systems are limited by their slow processing speed, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and expensive and challenging hardware setups. In this work, we demonstrate applying a denoising convolutional network to improve FLIM SNR. The network will be integrated with an instant FLIM system with fast data acquisition based on analog signal processing, high SNR using high-efficiency pulse-modulation, and cost-effective implementation utilizing off-the-shelf radio-frequency components. Our instant FLIM system simultaneously provides the intensity, lifetime…
Astronomical images suffer a constant presence of multiple defects that are consequences of the intrinsic properties of the acquisition equipments, and atmospheric conditions. One of the most frequent defects in astronomical imaging is the presence of additive noise which makes a denoising step mandatory before processing data. During the last decade, a particular modeling scheme, based on sparse representations, has drawn the attention of an ever growing community of researchers. Sparse representations offer a promising framework to many image and signal processing tasks, especially denoising…
A flexible discriminative image denoiser is introduced in which multi-task learning methods are applied to a densoising FCN based on U-Net. The activations of the U-Net model are modified by affine transforms that are a learned function of conditioning inputs. The learning procedure for multiple noise types and levels involves applying a distribution of noise parameters during training to the conditioning inputs, with the same noise parameters applied to a noise generating layer at the input (similar to the approach taken in a denoising autoencoder). It is shown that this flexible denoising mo…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Low rank matrix approximation (LRMA), which aims to recover the underlying low rank matrix from its degraded observation, has a wide range of applications in computer vision. The latest LRMA methods resort to using the nuclear norm minimization (NNM) as a convex relaxation of the nonconvex rank minimization. However, NNM tends to over-shrink the rank components and treats the different rank components equally, limiting its flexibility in practical applications. We propose a more flexible model, namely the Weighted Schatten $p$-Norm Minimization (WSNM), to generalize the NNM to the Schatten $p$…
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；École normale supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔理工学院）
We introduce a general framework for designing and training neural network layers whose forward passes can be interpreted as solving non-smooth convex optimization problems, and whose architectures are derived from an optimization algorithm. We focus on convex games, solved by local agents represented by the nodes of a graph and interacting through regularization functions. This approach is appealing for solving imaging problems, as it allows the use of classical image priors within deep models that are trainable end to end. The priors used in this presentation include variants of total variat…
Iterative Low-rank Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程学院，南京理工大学）；School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University（信息与通信技术学院，格里菲斯大学）；College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（计算机科学学院，浙江大学）
A successful class of image denoising methods is based on Bayesian approaches working in wavelet representations. However, analytical estimates can be obtained only for particular combinations of analytical models of signal and noise, thus precluding its straightforward extension to deal with other arbitrary noise sources. In this paper, we propose an alternative non-explicit way to take into account the relations among natural image wavelet coefficients for denoising: we use support vector regression (SVR) in the wavelet domain to enforce these relations in the estimated signal. Since relatio…
We propose an efficient neural network for RAW image denoising. Although neural network-based denoising has been extensively studied for image restoration, little attention has been given to efficient denoising for compute limited and power sensitive devices, such as smartphones and smartwatches. In this paper, we present a novel architecture and a suite of training techniques for high quality denoising in mobile devices. Our work is distinguished by three main contributions. (1) Feature-Align layer that modulates the activations of an encoder-decoder architecture with the input noisy images. …
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）
Most consumer-grade digital cameras can only capture a limited range of luminance in real-world scenes due to sensor constraints. Besides, noise and quantization errors are often introduced in the imaging process. In order to obtain high dynamic range (HDR) images with excellent visual quality, the most common solution is to combine multiple images with different exposures. However, it is not always feasible to obtain multiple images of the same scene and most HDR reconstruction methods ignore the noise and quantization loss. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based approach using a spa…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；SenseBrain Technology
Indirect Time-of-Flight (iToF) cameras are a promising depth sensing technology. However, they are prone to errors caused by multi-path interference (MPI) and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Traditional methods, after denoising, mitigate MPI by estimating a transient image that encodes depths. Recently, data-driven methods that jointly denoise and mitigate MPI have become state-of-the-art without using the intermediate transient representation. In this paper, we propose to revisit the transient representation. Using data-driven priors, we interpolate/extrapolate iToF frequencies and use them …
Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology（马林克罗特放射学研究所）
Multiple objective assessment of image-quality-based studies have reported that several deep-learning-based denoising methods show limited performance on signal-detection tasks. Our goal was to investigate the reasons for this limited performance. To achieve this goal, we conducted a task-based characterization of a DL-based denoising approach for individual signal properties. We conducted this study in the context of evaluating a DL-based approach for denoising SPECT images. The training data consisted of signals of different sizes and shapes within a clustered-lumpy background, imaged with a…
During the past few years, inverse problem formulations of ultrasound beamforming have attracted a growing interest. They usually pose beamforming as a minimization problem of a fidelity term resulting from the measurement model plus a regularization term that enforces a certain class on the resulting image. Herein, we take advantages of alternating direction method of multipliers to propose a flexible framework in which each term is optimized separately. Furthermore, the proposed beamforming formulation is extended to replace the regularization term by a denoising algorithm, based on the rece…
A flexible and accurate total variation and cascaded denoisers-based image reconstruction algorithm for hyperspectrally compressed ultrafast photography
Simultaneous Motion And Noise Estimation with Event Cameras
Keio University（庆应大学）；Woven by Toyota, Inc.（丰田公司）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林技术大学）；Einstein Center Digital Future, Robotics Institute Germany, and Science of Intelligence Excellence Cluster, Germany（数字未来爱因斯坦中心、德国机器人研究所及智能科学卓越中心）
College of Electronic and Optical Engineering & College of Microelectronics, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学电子与光学工程学院、微电子学院）；College of Telecommunications & Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）
Recently, low-rank matrix recovery theory has been emerging as a significant progress for various image processing problems. Meanwhile, the group sparse coding (GSC) theory has led to great successes in image restoration (IR) problem with each group contains low-rank property. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank minimization based denoising model for IR tasks under the perspective of GSC, an important connection between our denoising model and rank minimization problem has been put forward. To overcome the bias problem caused by convex nuclear norm minimization (NNM) for rank approximat…
Research institute for signals, systems and computational intelligence, sinc(i)（信号、系统与计算智能研究所（sinc(i)））；FICH-UNL（拉普拉塔国立大学工程学院）；CONICET（阿根廷国家科学与技术研究理事会）
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) proved to be highly accurate to perform anatomical segmentation of medical images. However, some of the most popular CNN architectures for image segmentation still rely on post-processing strategies (e.g. Conditional Random Fields) to incorporate connectivity constraints into the resulting masks. These post-processing steps are based on the assumption that objects are usually continuous and therefore nearby pixels should be assigned the same object label. Even if it is a valid assumption in general, these methods do not offer a straightforward way to in…
