Image Denoising for Strong Gaussian Noises With Specialized CNNs for Different Frequency Components

Abstract: In machine learning approach to image denoising a network is trained to recover a clean image from a noisy one. In this paper a novel structure is proposed based on training multiple specialized networks as opposed to existing structures that are base on a single network. The proposed model is an alternative for training a very deep network to avoid issues like vanishing or exploding gradient. By dividing a very deep network into two smaller networks the same number of learnable parameters will be available, but two smaller networks should be trained which are easier to train. Over smoothing and waxy artifacts are major problems with existing methods; because the network tries to keep the Mean Square Error (MSE) low for general structures and details, which leads to overlooking of details. This problem is more severe in the presence of strong noise. To reduce this problem, in the proposed structure, the image is decomposed into its low and high frequency components and each component is used to train a separate denoising convolutional neural network. One network is specialized to reconstruct the general structure of the image and the other one is specialized to reconstruct the details. Results of the proposed method show higher peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity index (SSIM) compared to a popular state of the art denoising method in the presence of strong noises.