Polarized Color Image Denoising using Pocoformer

Abstract: Polarized color photography provides both visual textures and object surficial information in one single snapshot. However, the use of the directional polarizing filter array causes extremely lower photon count and SNR compared to conventional color imaging. Thus, the feature essentially leads to unpleasant noisy images and destroys polarization analysis performance. It is a challenge for traditional image processing pipelines owing to the fact that the physical constraints exerted implicitly in the channels are excessively complicated. To address this issue, we propose a learning-based approach to simultaneously restore clean signals and precise polarization information. A real-world polarized color image dataset of paired raw short-exposed noisy and long-exposed reference images are captured to support the learning-based pipeline. Moreover, we embrace the development of vision Transformer and propose a hybrid transformer model for the Polarized Color image denoising, namely PoCoformer, for a better restoration performance. Abundant experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method and key factors that affect results are analyzed.