Considering Image Information and Self-Similarity: A Compositional Denoising Network

Abstract

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in image denoising, and their performance has been enhanced through residual learning. However, previous research mostly focused on optimizing the network architecture of CNNs, ignoring the limitations of the commonly used residual learning. This paper identifies two of its limitations, which are the neglect of image information and the lack of effective consideration of image self-similarity. To solve these limitations, this paper proposes a compositional denoising network (CDN), which contains two sub-paths, the image information path (IIP) and the noise estimation path (NEP), respectively. IIP is trained via an image-to-image method to extract image information. For NEP, it utilizes image self-similarity from the perspective of training. This similarity-based training method constrains NEP to output similar estimated noise distributions for different image patches with a specific kind of noise. Finally, image information and noise distribution information are comprehensively considered for image denoising. Experimental results indicate that CDN outperforms other CNN-based methods in both synthetic and real-world image denoising, achieving state-of-the-art performance.