CANDID: Correspondence AligNment for Deep-burst Image Denoising

Abstract: With the advent of mobile phone photography and point-and-shoot cameras, deep-burst imaging is widely used for a number of photographic effects such as depth of field, super-resolution, motion deblurring, and image denoising. In this work, we propose to solve the problem of deep-burst image denoising by including an optical flow-based correspondence estimation module which aligns all the input burst images with respect to a reference frame. In order to deal with varying noise levels the individual burst images are pre-filtered with different settings. Exploiting the established correspondences one network block predicts a pixel-wise spatially-varying filter kernel to smooth each image in the original and prefiltered bursts before fusing all images to generate the final denoised output. The resulting pipeline achieves state-of-the-art results by combining all available information provided by the burst.