# Neighbor2Neighbor: Self-Supervised Denoising from Single Noisy Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02824 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02824/

## Key facts

- Cited by 173 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04189/) (2018)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [Noise2Void - Learning Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10980/) (2018)
- [Noise2Self: Blind Denoising by Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11365/) (2019)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [MemNet: A Persistent Memory Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02209/) (2017)
- [CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07761/) (2020)
- [High-Quality Self-Supervised Deep Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10277/) (2019)
- [Noisier2Noise: Learning to Denoise from Unpaired Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11908/) (2019)
- [Neural Nearest Neighbors Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12575/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Learning of Deep Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13711/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic Noise2Void: Unsupervised Content-Aware Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00651/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Learning Based Denoisers without Ground Truth Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01314/) (2018)
- [When Image Denoising Meets High-Level Vision Tasks: A Deep Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04284/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Pixel Adaptive Image Denoiser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07569/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 173)

- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [AP-BSN: Self-Supervised Denoising for Real-World Images via Asymmetric PD and Blind-Spot Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11799/) (2022)
- [Blind2Unblind: Self-Supervised Image Denoising with Visible Blind Spots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06967/) (2022)
- [MR Image Denoising and Super-Resolution Using Regularized Reverse Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12621/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Noise2Noise: Efficient Image Denoising without any Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11253/) (2023)
- [DDM2: Self-Supervised Diffusion MRI Denoising with Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03018/) (2023)
- [CVF-SID: Cyclic multi-Variate Function for Self-Supervised Image Denoising by Disentangling Noise from Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13009/) (2022)
- [Degradation-Aware Feature Perturbation for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12630/) (2025)
- [LG-BPN: Local and Global Blind-Patch Network for Self-Supervised Real-World Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00534/) (2023)
- [IDR: Self-Supervised Image Denoising via Iterative Data Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14358/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Transfer CLIP for Generalizable Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15132/) (2024)
- [Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Denoising Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02574/) (2021)
- [When the Sun Goes Down: Repairing Photometric Losses for All-Day Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13850/) (2022)
- [An Annotation-free Restoration Network for Cataractous Fundus Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07737/) (2022)
- [DarkVisionNet: Low-Light Imaging via RGB-NIR Fusion with Deep Inconsistency Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06834/) (2023)
- [Noise Distribution Adaptive Self-Supervised Image Denoising using Tweedie Distribution and Score Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03696/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Image Restoration with Blurry and Noisy Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07317/) (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)
- [Structure-consistent Restoration Network for Cataract Fundus Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04684/) (2022)
- [Score Priors Guided Deep Variational Inference for Unsupervised Real-World Single Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04682/) (2023)
- [From Chaos to Clarity: 3DGS in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08300/) (2024)
- [SMAFormer: Synergistic Multi-Attention Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00346/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Image Denoising for Real-World Images with Context-aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01627/) (2023)
- [Generalized Recorrupted-to-Recorrupted: Self-Supervised Learning Beyond Gaussian Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04648/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised Image Denoising with Downsampled Invariance Loss and Conditional Blind-Spot Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09507/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the last few years, image denoising has benefited a lot from the fast development of neural networks. However, the requirement of large amounts of noisy-clean image pairs for supervision limits the wide use of these models. Although there have been a few attempts in training an image denoising model with only single noisy images, existing self-supervised denoising approaches suffer from inefficient network training, loss of useful information, or dependence on noise modeling. In this paper, we present a very simple yet effective method named Neighbor2Neighbor to train an effective image denoising model with only noisy images. Firstly, a random neighbor sub-sampler is proposed for the generation of training image pairs. In detail, input and target used to train a network are images sub-sampled from the same noisy image, satisfying the requirement that paired pixels of paired images are neighbors and have very similar appearance with each other. Secondly, a denoising network is trained on sub-sampled training pairs generated in the first stage, with a proposed regularizer as additional loss for better performance. The proposed Neighbor2Neighbor framework is able to enjoy the progress of state-of-the-art supervised denoising networks in network architecture design. Moreover, it avoids heavy dependence on the assumption of the noise distribution. We explain our approach from a theoretical perspective and further validate it through extensive experiments, including synthetic experiments with different noise distributions in sRGB space and real-world experiments on a denoising benchmark dataset in raw-RGB space.