# Transfer Learning from Synthetic to Real-Noise Denoising with Adaptive Instance Normalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11244 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11244/

## Key facts

- Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/) (2021)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Fast Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01649/) (2022)
- [Deep Generalized Unfolding Networks for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13348/) (2022)
- [AP-BSN: Self-Supervised Denoising for Real-World Images via Asymmetric PD and Blind-Spot Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11799/) (2022)
- [Invertible Denoising Network: A Light Solution for Real Noise Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10546/) (2021)
- [Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression through Spatially-Adaptive Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09551/) (2021)
- [C2N: Practical Generative Noise Modeling for Real-World Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09533/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Attentive Graph Learning for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06620/) (2021)
- [Xformer: Hybrid X-Shaped Transformer for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06440/) (2023)
- [LG-BPN: Local and Global Blind-Patch Network for Self-Supervised Real-World Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00534/) (2023)
- [Improving Image Restoration through Removing Degradations in Textual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17334/) (2023)
- [Spatially Adaptive Self-Supervised Learning for Real-World Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14934/) (2023)
- [Random Sub-Samples Generation for Self-Supervised Real Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16825/) (2023)
- [MM-BSN: Self-Supervised Image Denoising for Real-World with Multi-Mask based on Blind-Spot Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01598/) (2023)
- [Learning to Generate Realistic Noisy Images via Pixel-level Noise-aware Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02844/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Image Denoising in Real-World Scenarios via Self-Collaboration Parallel Generative Adversarial Branches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06776/) (2023)
- [Boosting Neural Representations for Videos with a Conditional Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18152/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Dynamic Filtering Network for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12051/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Model for Generative Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02398/) (2023)
- [Unidirectional Video Denoising by Mimicking Backward Recurrent Modules with Look-ahead Forward Ones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05532/) (2022)
- [Variational Deep Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01074/) (2022)
- [Exploring Efficient Asymmetric Blind-Spots for Self-Supervised Denoising in Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16783/) (2023)
- [Unleashing the Power of Self-Supervised Image Denoising: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00247/) (2023)
- [COLA-Net: Collaborative Attention Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05961/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Memory-Based Video Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02977/) (2022)
- [PUCA: Patch-Unshuffle and Channel Attention for Enhanced Self-Supervised Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10088/) (2023)
- [D2HNet: Joint Denoising and Deblurring with Hierarchical Network for Robust Night Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03294/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-noise denoising is a challenging task because the statistics of real-noise do not follow the normal distribution, and they are also spatially and temporally changing. In order to cope with various and complex real-noise, we propose a well-generalized denoising architecture and a transfer learning scheme. Specifically, we adopt an adaptive instance normalization to build a denoiser, which can regularize the feature map and prevent the network from overfitting to the training set. We also introduce a transfer learning scheme that transfers knowledge learned from synthetic-noise data to the real-noise denoiser. From the proposed transfer learning, the synthetic-noise denoiser can learn general features from various synthetic-noise data, and the real-noise denoiser can learn the real-noise characteristics from real data. From the experiments, we find that the proposed denoising method has great generalization ability, such that our network trained with synthetic-noise achieves the best performance for Darmstadt Noise Dataset (DND) among the methods from published papers. We can also see that the proposed transfer learning scheme robustly works for real-noise images through the learning with a very small number of labeled data.