Physics-informed deep neural network for image denoising

Abstract

Image enhancement deep neural networks (DNN) can improve signal to noise ratio or resolution of optically collected visual information. The literature reports a variety of approaches with varying effectiveness. All these algorithms rely on arbitrary data (the pixels’ count-rate) normalization, making their performance strngly affected by dataset or user-specific data pre-manipulation. We developed a DNN algorithm capable to enhance images signal-to-noise surpassing previous algorithms. Our model stems from the nature of the photon detection process which is characterized by an inherently Poissonian statistics. Our algorithm is thus driven by distance between probability functions instead than relying on the sole count-rate, producing high performance results especially in high-dynamic-range images. Moreover, it does not require any arbitrary image renormalization other than the transformation of the camera’s count-rate into photon-number.