Spatial-Adaptive Network for Single Image Denoising

Abstract: Previous works have shown that convolutional neural networks can achieve good performance in image denoising tasks. However, limited by the local rigid convolutional operation, these methods lead to oversmoothing artifacts. A deeper network structure could alleviate these problems, but more computational overhead is needed. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-adaptive denoising network (SADNet) for efficient single image blind noise removal. To adapt to changes in spatial textures and edges, we design a residual spatial-adaptive block. Deformable convolution is introduced to sample the spatially correlated features for weighting. An encoder-decoder structure with a context block is introduced to capture multiscale information. With noise removal from the coarse to fine, a high-quality noisefree image can be obtained. We apply our method to both synthetic and real noisy image datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can surpass the state-of-the-art denoising methods both quantitatively and visually.