A Nested UNet Based on Multi-Scale Feature Extraction for Mixed Gaussian-Impulse Removal

Abstract

Eliminating mixed noise from images is a challenging task because accurately describing the attenuation of noise distribution is difficult. However, most existing algorithms for mixed noise removal solely rely on the local information of the image and neglect the global information, resulting in suboptimal denoising performance when dealing with complex mixed noise. In this paper, we propose a nested UNet based on multi-scale feature extraction (MSNUNet) for mixed noise removal. In MSNUNet, we introduce a U-shaped subnetwork called MSU-Subnet for multi-scale feature extraction. These multi-scale features contain abundant local and global features, aiding the model in estimating noise more accurately and improving its robustness. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-scale feature fusion channel attention module (MSCAM) to effectively aggregate feature information from different scales while preserving intricate image texture details. Our experimental results demonstrate that MSNUNet achieves leading performance in terms of quality metrics and the visual appearance of images.