Filtering multi-dimensional images such as color images, color videos, multispectral images and magnetic resonance images is challenging in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Leveraging the nonlocal self-similarity (NLSS) characteristic of images and sparse representation in the transform domain, the block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) based methods show powerful denoising performance. Recently, numerous new approaches with different regularization terms, transforms and advanced deep neural network (DNN) architectures are proposed to improve denoising quality. In this paper, we extensively compare over 60 methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. We also introduce a new color image and video dataset for benchmarking, and our evaluations are performed from four different perspectives including quantitative metrics, visual effects, human ratings and computational cost. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate: (i) the effectiveness and efficiency of the BM3D family for various denoising tasks, (ii) a simple matrix-based algorithm could produce similar results compared with its tensor counterparts, and (iii) several DNN models trained with synthetic Gaussian noise show state-of-the-art performance on real-world color image and video datasets. Despite the progress in recent years, we discuss shortcomings and possible extensions of existing techniques. Datasets and codes for evaluation are made publicly available at https://github.com/ZhaomingKong/Denoising-Comparison.
Image denoising is a classical signal processing problem that has received significant interest within the image processing community during the past two decades. Most of the algorithms for image denoising has focused on the paradigm of non-local similarity, where image blocks in the neighborhood that are similar, are collected to build a basis for reconstruction. Through rigorous experimentation, this paper reviews multiple aspects of image denoising algorithm development based on non-local similarity. Firstly, the concept of non-local similarity as a foundational quality that exists in natur…
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Image denoising can be described as the problem of mapping from a noisy image to a noise-free image. The best currently available denoising methods approximate this mapping with cleverly engineered algorithms. In this work we attempt to learn this mapping directly with plain multi layer perceptrons (MLP) applied to image patches. We will show that by training on large image databases we are able to outperform the current state-of-the-art image denoising methods. In addition, our method achieves results that are superior to one type of theoretical bound and goes a large way toward closing the g…
The extensive use of medical CT has raised a public concern over the radiation dose to the patient. Reducing the radiation dose leads to increased CT image noise and artifacts, which can adversely affect not only the radiologists judgement but also the performance of downstream medical image analysis tasks. Various low-dose CT denoising methods, especially the recent deep learning based approaches, have produced impressive results. However, the existing denoising methods are all downstream-task-agnostic and neglect the diverse needs of the downstream applications. In this paper, we introduce a…
Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）
We propose a deep reparametrization of the maximum a posteriori formulation commonly employed in multi-frame image restoration tasks. Our approach is derived by introducing a learned error metric and a latent representation of the target image, which transforms the MAP objective to a deep feature space. The deep reparametrization allows us to directly model the image formation process in the latent space, and to integrate learned image priors into the prediction. Our approach thereby leverages the advantages of deep learning, while also benefiting from the principled multi-frame fusion provide…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Deep learning (DL) based hyperspectral images (HSIs) denoising approaches directly learn the nonlinear mapping between observed noisy images and underlying clean images. They normally do not consider the physical characteristics of HSIs, therefore making them lack of interpretability that is key to understand their denoising mechanism.. In order to tackle this problem, we introduce a novel model guided interpretable network for HSI denoising. Specifically, fully considering the spatial redundancy, spectral low-rankness and spectral-spatial properties of HSIs, we first establish a subspace base…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
We devise a new regularization, called self-verification, for image denoising. This regularization is formulated using a deep image prior learned by the network, rather than a traditional predefined prior. Specifically, we treat the output of the network as a ``prior'' that we denoise again after ``re-noising''. The comparison between the again denoised image and its prior can be interpreted as a self-verification of the network's denoising ability. We demonstrate that self-verification encourages the network to capture low-level image statistics needed to restore the image. Based on this self…
Communication University of China（中国传媒大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in image denoising. Existing methods benefited from residual learning and achieved high performance. Much research has been paid attention to optimizing the network architecture of CNN but ignored the limitations of residual learning. This paper suggests two limitations of it. One is that residual learning focuses on estimating noise, thus overlooking the image information. The other is that the image self-similarity is not effectively considered. This paper proposes a compositional denoising network (CDN), whose image inform…
This paper introduces a new approach to non-local means image denoising. Instead of using all pixels located in the search window for estimating the value of a pixel, we identify the highly corrupted pixels and assign less weight to these pixels. This method is called robust non-local means. Numerical and subjective evaluations using ultrasound images show good performances of the proposed denoising method in recovering the shape of edges and important detailed components, in comparison to traditional ultrasound image denoising methods
University of Massachusetts Medical School（马萨诸塞大学医学院）；The University of Akron（阿克伦大学）
Noise is a major issue while transferring images through all kinds of electronic communication. One of the most common noise in electronic communication is an impulse noise which is caused by unstable voltage. In this paper, the comparison of known image denoising techniques is discussed and a new technique using the decision based approach has been used for the removal of impulse noise. All these methods can primarily preserve image details while suppressing impulsive noise. The principle of these techniques is at first introduced and then analysed with various simulation results using MATLAB…
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 …
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；GuangDong TUS-TuWei Technology Co.,Ltd（广东拓思途维科技有限公司）
While deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown extraordinary capability of modelling specific noise and denoising, they still perform poorly on real-world noisy images. The main reason is that the real-world noise is more sophisticated and diverse. To tackle the issue of blind denoising, in this paper, we propose a novel pyramid real image denoising network (PRIDNet), which contains three stages. First, the noise estimation stage uses channel attention mechanism to recalibrate the channel importance of input noise. Second, at the multi-scale denoising stage, pyramid pooling is util…
Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse（图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；Laboratoire de Physique Théorique（理论物理实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；UPS（巴黎萨克雷大学）；Université de Lyon（里昂大学）；INSA-Lyon（里昂国立应用科学学院）；Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学）；UJM-Saint Etienne（圣艾蒂安让·莫内大学）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；CREATIS（医学成像与信号处理研究中心）
Sparse representation of real-life images is a very effective approach in imaging applications, such as denoising. In recent years, with the growth of computing power, data-driven strategies exploiting the redundancy within patches extracted from one or several images to increase sparsity have become more prominent. This paper presents a novel image denoising algorithm exploiting such an image-dependent basis inspired by the quantum many-body theory. Based on patch analysis, the similarity measures in a local image neighborhood are formalized through a term akin to interaction in quantum mecha…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
The ultimate aim of image restoration like denoising is to find an exact correlation between the noisy and clear image domains. But the optimization of end-to-end denoising learning like pixel-wise losses is performed in a sample-to-sample manner, which ignores the intrinsic correlation of images, especially semantics. In this paper, we introduce the Deep Semantic Statistics Matching (D2SM) Denoising Network. It exploits semantic features of pretrained classification networks, then it implicitly matches the probabilistic distribution of clear images at the semantic feature space. By learning t…
Southwest University of Science and Technology（西南科技大学）；SUNY Binghamton（纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿分校）
Performance of the sensor-based camera identification (SCI) method heavily relies on the denoising filter in estimating Photo-Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU). Given various attempts on enhancing the quality of the extracted PRNU, it still suffers from unsatisfactory performance in low-resolution images and high computational demand. Leveraging the similarity of PRNU estimation and image denoising, we take advantage of the latest achievements of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based denoisers for PRNU extraction. In this paper, a comparative evaluation of such CNN denoisers on SCI performance…
School of Statistics and Data Science, Nankai University（南开大学统计与数据科学学院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学第一附属医院）；Shanxi Engineering Research Center of Computational Imaging and Medical Intelligence（山西省计算成像与医学智能工程研究中心）
A problem of image denoising when images are corrupted by a non-stationary noise is considered in this paper. Since in practice no a priori information on noise is available, noise statistics should be pre-estimated for image denoising. In this paper, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based method for estimation of a map of local, patch-wise, standard deviations of noise (so-called sigma-map) is proposed. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance in accuracy of estimation of sigma-map for the case of non-stationary noise, as well as estimation of noise variance for the case of additiv…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；State Administration of Cultural Heritage（国家文物局）
Image denoising can remove natural noise that widely exists in images captured by multimedia devices due to low-quality imaging sensors, unstable image transmission processes, or low light conditions. Recent works also find that image denoising benefits the high-level vision tasks, e.g., image classification. In this work, we try to challenge this common sense and explore a totally new problem, i.e., whether the image denoising can be given the capability of fooling the state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) while enhancing the image quality. To this end, we initiate the very first attem…
Lodz University of Technology（罗兹工业大学）；Medical University of Lodz（罗兹医科大学）；Siemens Healthcare GmbH（西门子医疗有限公司）
In this paper, we propose a method for denoising diffusion-weighted images (DWI) of the brain using a convolutional neural network trained on realistic, synthetic MR data. We compare our results to averaging of repeated scans, a widespread method used in clinics to improve signal-to-noise ratio of MR images. To obtain training data for transfer learning, we model, in a data-driven fashion, the effects of echo-planar imaging (EPI): Nyquist ghosting and ramp sampling. We introduce these effects to the digital phantom of brain anatomy (BrainWeb). Instead of simulating pseudo-random noise with a d…
Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences（匈牙利科学院计算机科学与控制研究所）
In this paper, we propose a novel image denoising algorithm using collaborative support-agnostic sparse reconstruction. An observed image is first divided into patches. Similarly structured patches are grouped together to be utilized for collaborative processing. In the proposed collaborative schemes, similar patches are assumed to share the same support taps. For sparse reconstruction, the likelihood of a tap being active in a patch is computed and refined through a collaboration process with other similar patches in the same group. This provides very good patch support estimation, hence enha…
Variational Denoising Network: Toward Blind Noise Modeling and Removal
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；The Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）
This paper proposes a new procedure in order to improve the performance of block matching and 3-D filtering (BM3D) image denoising algorithm. It is demonstrated that it is possible to achieve a better performance than that of BM3D algorithm in a variety of noise levels. This method changes BM3D algorithm parameter values according to noise level, removes prefiltering, which is used in high noise level; therefore Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and visual quality get improved, and BM3D complexities and processing time are reduced. This improved BM3D algorithm is extended and used to denoise s…
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…
As a special type of transformer, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are used to various computer vision applications (CV), such as image recognition. There are several potential problems with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that can be solved with ViTs. For image coding tasks like compression, super-resolution, segmentation, and denoising, different variants of the ViTs are used. The purpose of this survey is to present the first application of ViTs in CV. The survey is the first of its kind on ViTs for CVs to the best of our knowledge. In the first step, we classify different CV applications wh…
Regularization by Denoising (RED), as recently proposed by Romano, Elad, and Milanfar, is powerful image-recovery framework that aims to minimize an explicit regularization objective constructed from a plug-in image-denoising function. Experimental evidence suggests that the RED algorithms are state-of-the-art. We claim, however, that explicit regularization does not explain the RED algorithms. In particular, we show that many of the expressions in the paper by Romano et al. hold only when the denoiser has a symmetric Jacobian, and we demonstrate that such symmetry does not occur with practica…
IDF: Iterative Dynamic Filtering Networks for Generalizable Image Denoising
Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University（翰阳大学计算机科学系）；School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学计算机与人工智能学院）
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
Image denoising is an important low-level computer vision task, which aims to reconstruct a noise-free and high-quality image from a noisy image. With the development of deep learning, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been gradually applied and achieved great success in image denoising, image compression, image enhancement, etc. Recently, Transformer has been a hot technique, which is widely used to tackle computer vision tasks. However, few Transformer-based methods have been proposed for low-level vision tasks. In this paper, we proposed an image denoising network structure based on Tr…
University of Goettingen（哥廷根大学）；Statistical and Applied Mathematical Science Institute（统计与应用数学科学研究所）
We consider the very challenging task of restoring images (i) which have a large number of missing pixels, (ii) whose existing pixels are corrupted by noise and (iii) the ideal image to be restored contains both cartoon and texture elements. The combination of these three properties makes this inverse problem a very difficult one. The solution proposed in this manuscript is based on directional global three-part decomposition (DG3PD) [ThaiGottschlich2016] with directional total variation norm, directional G-norm and $\ell_\infty$-norm in curvelet domain as key ingredients of the model. Image d…
Image denoising is getting more significance, especially in Computed Tomography (CT), which is an important and most common modality in medical imaging. This is mainly due to that the effectiveness of clinical diagnosis using CT image lies on the image quality. The denoising technique for CT images using window-based Multi-wavelet transformation and thresholding shows the effectiveness in denoising, however, a drawback exists in selecting the closer windows in the process of window-based multi-wavelet transformation and thresholding. Generally, the windows of the duplicate noisy image that are…
In this paper, we propose a novel image denoising algorithm exploiting features from both spatial as well as transformed domain. We implement intensity-invariance based improved grouping for collaborative support-agnostic sparse reconstruction. For collaboration firstly, we stack similar-structured patches via intensity-invariant correlation measure. The grouped patches collaborate to yield desirable sparse estimates for noise filtering. This is because similar patches share the same support in the transformed domain, such similar supports can be used as probabilities of active taps to refine …
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…
The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Beira Interior（贝拉内大学）；Siddaganga Institute of Technology（西达甘加理工学院）；National Institute of Technology Karnataka（卡纳塔克邦国立理工学院）；Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology（萨达尔·瓦拉巴伊·帕特尔国立理工学院）；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）；University of Twente（特温特大学）；University of Kragujevac（克拉古耶瓦茨大学）；Prince Sultan University（苏丹王子大学）；University of Tunis El Manar（突尼斯埃尔马纳尔大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University（武汉大学数学与统计学学院）；Department of Computer and Information Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau（澳门大学计算机与信息科学系）；Hubei Center for Applied Mathematics, Wuhan University（湖北应用数学中心，武汉大学）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Computational Science, Wuhan University（湖北计算科学重点实验室，武汉大学）
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre（德克萨斯大学西南医学中心）
Low Dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) is clinically desirable due to the reduced radiation to patients. However, the quality of LDCT images is often sub-optimal because of the inevitable strong quantum noise. Inspired by their unprecedent success in computer vision, deep learning (DL)-based techniques have been used for LDCT denoising. Despite the promising noise removal ability of DL models, people have observed that the resolution of the DL-denoised images is compromised, decreasing their clinical value. Aiming at relieving this problem, in this work, we developed a more effective denoiser by …
Deep learning approaches in image processing predominantly resort to supervised learning. A majority of methods for image denoising are no exception to this rule and hence demand pairs of noisy and corresponding clean images. Only recently has there been the emergence of methods such as Noise2Void, where a deep neural network learns to denoise solely from noisy images. However, when clean images that do not directly correspond to any of the noisy images are actually available, there is room for improvement as these clean images contain useful information that fully unsupervised methods do not …
Mathematical framework for perception-driven parameter choice in image denoising
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学数学与统计系）；Department of Computational Engineering, LUT University（拉赫蒂理工大学计算工程系）；Faculty of Technology and Seafaring, Maritime Technology, Novia University of Applied Sciences（诺维亚应用科学大学海事技术技术与航海学院）
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…
B-mode ultrasound tongue imaging is widely used in the speech production field. However, efficient interpretation is in a great need for the tongue image sequences. Inspired by the recent success of unsupervised deep learning approach, we explore unsupervised convolutional network architecture for the feature extraction in the ultrasound tongue image, which can be helpful for the clinical linguist and phonetics. By quantitative comparison between different unsupervised feature extraction approaches, the denoising convolutional autoencoder (DCAE)-based method outperforms the other feature extra…
GAN-Based Architecture for Low-dose Computed Tomography Imaging Denoising
College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学生命科学技术学院）；New York University Shanghai（上海纽约大学）；School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生命科学技术学院）
As a 3-order tensor, a multi-spectral image (MSI) has dozens of spectral bands, which can deliver more information for real scenes. However, real MSIs are often corrupted by noises in the sensing process, which will further deteriorate the performance of higher-level classification and recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a Low-rank Tensor Dictionary Learning (LTDL) method for MSI denoising. Firstly, we extract blocks from the MSI and cluster them into groups. Then instead of using the exactly low-rank model, we consider a nearly low-rank approximation, which is closer to the latent lo…
Compressive sensing is an impressive approach for fast MRI. It aims at reconstructing MR image using only a few under-sampled data in k-space, enhancing the efficiency of the data acquisition. In this study, we propose to learn priors based on undecimated wavelet transform and an iterative image reconstruction algorithm. At the stage of prior learning, transformed feature images obtained by undecimated wavelet transform are stacked as an input of denoising autoencoder network (DAE). The highly redundant and multi-scale input enables the correlation of feature images at different channels, whic…
Two-dimensional (2D) fast spin echo (FSE) techniques play a central role in the clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of knee joints. Moreover, three-dimensional (3D) FSE provides high-isotropic-resolution magnetic resonance (MR) images of knee joints, but it has a reduced signal-to-noise ratio compared to 2D FSE. Deep-learning denoising methods are a promising approach for denoising MR images, but they are often trained using synthetic noise due to challenges in obtaining true noise distributions for MR images. In this study, inherent true noise information from 2-NEX acquisition was used…
