Learning Non-local Image Diffusion for Image Denoising
This work addresses image denoising for computer vision applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing trainable diffusion models.
The authors tackled the problem of image denoising by embedding non-local self-similarity priors into a trainable reaction diffusion model to reduce artifacts and preserve textures, achieving competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR and SSIM metrics.
Image diffusion plays a fundamental role for the task of image denoising. Recently proposed trainable nonlinear reaction diffusion (TNRD) model defines a simple but very effective framework for image denoising. However, as the TNRD model is a local model, the diffusion behavior of which is purely controlled by information of local patches, it is prone to create artifacts in the homogenous regions and over-smooth highly textured regions, especially in the case of strong noise levels. Meanwhile, it is widely known that the non-local self-similarity (NSS) prior stands as an effective image prior for image denoising, which has been widely exploited in many non-local methods. In this work, we are highly motivated to embed the NSS prior into the TNRD model to tackle its weaknesses. In order to preserve the expected property that end-to-end training is available, we exploit the NSS prior by a set of non-local filters, and derive our proposed trainable non-local reaction diffusion (TNLRD) model for image denoising. Together with the local filters and influence functions, the non-local filters are learned by employing loss-specific training. The experimental results show that the trained TNLRD model produces visually plausible recovered images with more textures and less artifacts, compared to its local versions. Moreover, the trained TNLRD model can achieve strongly competitive performance to recent state-of-the-art image denoising methods in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM).