# NFCNN: Toward a Noise Fusion Convolutional Neural Network for Image Denoising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09376 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09376/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [Efficient Object Localization Using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4280/) (2014)
- [Trainable Nonlinear Reaction Diffusion: A Flexible Framework for Fast and Effective Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.02848/) (2015)
- [Suggestive Annotation: A Deep Active Learning Framework for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04737/) (2017)
- [Interactive Medical Image Segmentation using Deep Learning with Image-specific Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04043/) (2017)
- [An efficient feature-preserving PDE algorithm for image denoising based on a spatial-fractional anisotropic diffusion equation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01496/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning based methods have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in image denoising. In this paper, a deep learning based denoising method is proposed and a module called fusion block is introduced in the convolutional neural network. For this so-called Noise Fusion Convolutional Neural Network (NFCNN), there are two branches in its multi-stage architecture. One branch aims to predict the latent clean image, while the other one predicts the residual image. A fusion block is contained between every two stages by taking the predicted clean image and the predicted residual image as a part of inputs, and it outputs a fused result to the next stage. NFCNN has an attractive texture preserving ability because of the fusion block. To train NFCNN, a stage-wise supervised training strategy is adopted to avoid the vanishing gradient and exploding gradient problems. Experimental results show that NFCNN is able to perform competitive denoising results when compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms.