A Triple Deep Image Prior Model for Image Denoising Based on Mixed Priors and Noise Learning

Abstract

Image denoising poses a significant challenge in computer vision due to the high-level visual task’s dependency on image quality. Several advanced denoising models have been proposed in recent decades. Recently, deep image prior (DIP), using a particular network structure and a noisy image to achieve denoising, has provided a novel image denoising method. However, the denoising performance of the DIP model still lags behind that of mainstream denoising models. To improve the performance of the DIP denoising model, we propose a TripleDIP model with internal and external mixed images priors for image denoising. The TripleDIP comprises of three branches: one for content learning and two for independent noise learning. We firstly use a Transformer-based supervised model (i.e., Restormer) to obtain a pre-denoised image (used as external prior) from a given noisy image, and then take the noisy image and the pre-denoised image as the first and second target image, respectively, to perform the denoising process under the designed loss function. We add constraints between two-branch noise learning and content learning, allowing the TripleDIP to employ external prior while enhancing independent noise learning stability. Moreover, the automatic stop criterion we proposed prevents the model from overfitting the noisy image and improves the execution efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that TripleDIP outperforms the original DIP by an average of 2.79 dB and outperforms classical unsupervised methods such as N2V by an average of 2.68 dB and the latest supervised models such as SwinIR and Restormer by an average of 0.63 dB and 0.59 dB on the Set12 dataset. This can mainly be attributed to the fact that two-branch noise learning can obtain more stable noise while constraining the content learning branch’s optimization process. Our proposed TripleDIP significantly enhances DIP denoising performance and has broad application potential in scenarios with insufficient training datasets.