Low Latency Video Denoising for Online Conferencing Using CNN Architectures

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a pipeline for real-time video denoising with low runtime cost and high perceptual quality. The vast majority of denoising studies focus on image denoising. However, a minority of research works focusing on video denoising do so with higher performance costs to obtain higher quality while maintaining temporal coherence. The approach we introduce in this paper leverages the advantages of both image and video-denoising architectures. Our pipeline first denoises the keyframes or one-fifth of the frames using HI-GAN blind image denoising architecture. Then, the remaining four-fifths of the noisy frames and the denoised keyframe data are fed into the FastDVDnet video denoising model. The final output is rendered in the user's display in real-time. The combination of these low-latency neural network architectures produces real-time denoising with high perceptual quality with applications in video conferencing and other real-time media streaming systems. A custom noise detector analyzer provides real-time feedback to adapt the weights and improve the models' output.