Asymmetric Mask Scheme for Self-Supervised Real Image Denoising

TL;DR

This paper introduces an asymmetric mask scheme for self-supervised real image denoising that removes the need for blind spot operations, enabling more flexible network design and achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The proposed asymmetric mask scheme simplifies network design by eliminating blind spot constraints and improves denoising performance on real noisy images.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art denoising performance on real noisy datasets.

Eliminates the need for blind spot operations in self-supervised denoising.

Provides a flexible framework for training and inference with masks.

Abstract

In recent years, self-supervised denoising methods have gained significant success and become critically important in the field of image restoration. Among them, the blind spot network based methods are the most typical type and have attracted the attentions of a large number of researchers. Although the introduction of blind spot operations can prevent identity mapping from noise to noise, it imposes stringent requirements on the receptive fields in the network design, thereby limiting overall performance. To address this challenge, we propose a single mask scheme for self-supervised denoising training, which eliminates the need for blind spot operation and thereby removes constraints on the network structure design. Furthermore, to achieve denoising across entire image during inference, we propose a multi-mask scheme. Our method, featuring the asymmetric mask scheme in training and inference, achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing real noisy image datasets. All the source code will be made available to the public.