Blind2Sound: Self-Supervised Image Denoising without Residual Noise
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-visible loss senses noise levels and performs personalized denoising without noise residues while retaining the signal lossless. The theoretical analysis of intermediate medium gradients guarantees stable training, while the Cramer Gaussian loss acts as a regularization to facilitate the accurate perception of noise levels and improve the performance of the denoiser. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the superior performance of our method, especially for single-channel images.
Group sparsity has shown great potential in various low-level vision tasks (e.g, image denoising, deblurring and inpainting). In this paper, we propose a new prior model for image denoising via group sparsity residual constraint (GSRC). To enhance the performance of group sparse-based image denoising, the concept of group sparsity residual is proposed, and thus, the problem of image denoising is translated into one that reduces the group sparsity residual. To reduce the residual, we first obtain some good estimation of the group sparse coefficients of the original image by the first-pass estim…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
Discriminative model learning for image denoising has been recently attracting considerable attentions due to its favorable denoising performance. In this paper, we take one step forward by investigating the construction of feed-forward denoising convolutional neural networks (DnCNNs) to embrace the progress in very deep architecture, learning algorithm, and regularization method into image denoising. Specifically, residual learning and batch normalization are utilized to speed up the training process as well as boost the denoising performance. Different from the existing discriminative denois…
Thermal cameras show noisy images due to their limited thermal resolution, especially for the scenes of a low temperature difference. In order to deal with a noise problem, this paper proposes a novel neural network architecture with repeatable denoising inception-residual blocks(DnIRB) for noise learning. Each DnIRB has two sub-blocks with difference receptive fields and one shortcut connection to prevent a vanishing gradient problem. The proposed approach is tested for thermal images. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach shows the best SQNR performance and reasonable …
Nonlocal image representation has been successfully used in many image-related inverse problems including denoising, deblurring and deblocking. However, a majority of reconstruction methods only exploit the nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) prior of the degraded observation image, it is very challenging to reconstruct the latent clean image. In this paper we propose a novel model for image denoising via group sparsity residual and external NSS prior. To boost the performance of image denoising, the concept of group sparsity residual is proposed, and thus the problem of image denoising is transfor…
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…
Variations of deep neural networks such as convolutional neural network (CNN) have been successfully applied to image denoising. The goal is to automatically learn a mapping from a noisy image to a clean image given training data consisting of pairs of noisy and clean images. Most existing CNN models for image denoising have many layers. In such cases, the models involve a large amount of parameters and are computationally expensive to train. In this paper, we develop a dilated residual CNN for Gaussian image denoising. Compared with the recently proposed residual denoiser, our method can achi…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
Group-based sparse representation has shown great potential in image denoising. However, most existing methods only consider the nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) prior of noisy input image. That is, the similar patches are collected only from degraded input, which makes the quality of image denoising largely depend on the input itself. However, such methods often suffer from a common drawback that the denoising performance may degrade quickly with increasing noise levels. In this paper we propose a new prior model, called group sparsity residual constraint (GSRC). Unlike the conventional group-b…
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）
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）；Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）
Inspired by group-based sparse coding, recently proposed group sparsity residual (GSR) scheme has demonstrated superior performance in image processing. However, one challenge in GSR is to estimate the residual by using a proper reference of the group-based sparse coding (GSC), which is desired to be as close to the truth as possible. Previous researches utilized the estimations from other algorithms (i.e., GMM or BM3D), which are either not accurate or too slow. In this paper, we propose to use the Non-Local Samples (NLS) as reference in the GSR regime for image denoising, thus termed GSR-NLS…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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）
Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is a crucial preprocessing procedure to improve the performance of the subsequent HSI interpretation and applications. In this paper, a novel deep learning-based method for this task is proposed, by learning a non-linear end-to-end mapping between the noisy and clean HSIs with a combined spatial-spectral deep convolutional neural network (HSID-CNN). Both the spatial and spectral information are simultaneously assigned to the proposed network. In addition, multi-scale feature extraction and multi-level feature representation are respectively employed to captu…
We propose to learn a fully-convolutional network model that consists of a Chain of Identity Mapping Modules and residual on the residual architecture for image denoising. Our network structure possesses three distinctive features that are important for the noise removal task. Firstly, each unit employs identity mappings as the skip connections and receives pre-activated input to preserve the gradient magnitude propagated in both the forward and backward directions. Secondly, by utilizing dilated kernels for the convolution layers in the residual branch, each neuron in the last convolution lay…
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…
Recent research on image denoising has progressed with the development of deep learning architectures, especially convolutional neural networks. However, real-world image denoising is still very challenging because it is not possible to obtain ideal pairs of ground-truth images and real-world noisy images. Owing to the recent release of benchmark datasets, the interest of the image denoising community is now moving toward the real-world denoising problem. In this paper, we propose a grouped residual dense network (GRDN), which is an extended and generalized architecture of the state-of-the-art…
Supervised neural networks are known to achieve excellent results in various image restoration tasks. However, such training requires datasets composed of pairs of corrupted images and their corresponding ground truth targets. Unfortunately, such data is not available in many applications. For the task of image denoising in which the noise statistics is unknown, several self-supervised training methods have been proposed for overcoming this difficulty. Some of these require knowledge of the noise model, while others assume that the contaminating noise is uncorrelated, both assumptions are too …
Next-Scale Prediction: A Self-Supervised Approach for Real-World Image Denoising
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机科学学院）；National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation, Sichuan University（四川大学工程数值模拟基础算法与模型全国重点实验室）
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…
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…
Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is of crucial importance for many subsequent applications, such as HSI classification and interpretation. In this paper, we propose an attention-based deep residual network to directly learn a mapping from noisy HSI to the clean one. To jointly utilize the spatial-spectral information, the current band and its $K$ adjacent bands are simultaneously exploited as the input. Then, we adopt convolution layer with different filter sizes to fuse the multi-scale feature, and use shortcut connection to incorporate the multi-level information for better noise removal.…
In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) for image denoising, which uses exponential linear unit (ELU) as the activation function. We investigate the suitability by analyzing ELU's connection with trainable nonlinear reaction diffusion model (TNRD) and residual denoising. On the other hand, batch normalization (BN) is indispensable for residual denoising and convergence purpose. However, direct stacking of BN and ELU degrades the performance of CNN. To mitigate this issue, we design an innovative combination of activation layer and normalization layer to exploit and…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
State-of-the-art image denoisers exploit various types of deep neural networks via deterministic training. Alternatively, very recent works utilize deep reinforcement learning for restoring images with diverse or unknown corruptions. Though deep reinforcement learning can generate effective policy networks for operator selection or architecture search in image restoration, how it is connected to the classic deterministic training in solving inverse problems remains unclear. In this work, we propose a novel image denoising scheme via Residual Recovery using Reinforcement Learning, dubbed R3L. W…
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…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University（复旦大学类脑智能科学与技术研究院）；Huashan Hospital, Fudan University（复旦大学附属华山医院）
Small lesions in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images are crucial for clinical diagnosis of many kinds of diseases. However, the MRI quality can be easily degraded by various noise, which can greatly affect the accuracy of diagnosis of small lesion. Although some methods for denoising MR images have been proposed, task-specific denoising methods for improving the diagnosis confidence of small lesions are lacking. In this work, we propose a voxel-wise hybrid residual MLP-CNN model to denoise three-dimensional (3D) MR images with small lesions. We combine basic deep learning architecture, MLP…
A deep learning approach to blind denoising of images without complete knowledge of the noise statistics is considered. We propose DN-ResNet, which is a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) consisting of several residual blocks (ResBlocks). With cascade training, DN-ResNet is more accurate and more computationally efficient than the state of art denoising networks. An edge-aware loss function is further utilized in training DN-ResNet, so that the denoising results have better perceptive quality compared to conventional loss function. Next, we introduce the depthwise separable DN-ResNet (DS-…
Hanyang University（汉阳大学）；NAVER LABS（NAVER实验室）；Chungnam National University（忠南国立大学）；SK T-Brain
In this study, we propose a simple and effective fine-tuning algorithm called "restore-from-restored", which can greatly enhance the performance of fully pre-trained image denoising networks. Many supervised denoising approaches can produce satisfactory results using large external training datasets. However, these methods have limitations in using internal information available in a given test image. By contrast, recent self-supervised approaches can remove noise in the input image by utilizing information from the specific test input. However, such methods show relatively lower performance o…
Gachon University（嘉泉大学）；Hanyang University (ERICA)（汉阳大学（ERICA））
Recently, the application of low rank minimization to image denoising has shown remarkable denoising results which are equivalent or better than those of the existing state-of-the-art algorithms. However, due to iterative nature of low rank optimization, estimation of residual noise is an essential requirement after each iteration. Currently, this noise is estimated by using the filtered noise in the previous iteration without considering the geometric structure of the given image. This estimate may be affected in the presence of moderate and severe levels of noise. To obtain a more reliable e…
Shaanxi Normal University（陕西师范大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Recent years have witnessed the great success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image denoising. Albeit deeper network and larger model capacity generally benefit performance, it remains a challenging practical issue to train a very deep image denoising network. Using multilevel wavelet-CNN (MWCNN) as an example, we empirically find that the denoising performance cannot be significantly improved by either increasing wavelet decomposition levels or increasing convolution layers within each level. To cope with this issue, this paper presents a multi-level wavelet residual network (…
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 …
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…
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…
Nankai University（南开大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)（人工智能 inception 研究院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
Supervised deep networks have achieved promisingperformance on image denoising, by learning image priors andnoise statistics on plenty pairs of noisy and clean images. Unsupervised denoising networks are trained with only noisy images. However, for an unseen corrupted image, both supervised andunsupervised networks ignore either its particular image prior, the noise statistics, or both. That is, the networks learned from external images inherently suffer from a domain gap problem: the image priors and noise statistics are very different between the training and test images. This problem become…
National Chung Hsing University（国立中兴大学）；National Taichung University of Science and Technology（国立台中科技大学）
Image restoration is a low-level vision task which is to restore degraded images to noise-free images. With the success of deep neural networks, the convolutional neural networks surpass the traditional restoration methods and become the mainstream in the computer vision area. To advance the performanceof denoising algorithms, we propose a blind real image denoising network (SRMNet) by employing a hierarchical architecture improved from U-Net. Specifically, we use a selective kernel with residual block on the hierarchical structure called M-Net to enrich the multi-scale semantic information. F…
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…
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…
We present a method for supervised learning of sparsity-promoting regularizers for image denoising. Sparsity-promoting regularization is a key ingredient in solving modern image reconstruction problems; however, the operators underlying these regularizers are usually either designed by hand or learned from data in an unsupervised way. The recent success of supervised learning (mainly convolutional neural networks) in solving image reconstruction problems suggests that it could be a fruitful approach to designing regularizers. As a first experiment in this direction, we propose to denoise image…
