# Variational Deep Image Denoising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00965 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00965/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11127/) (2018)
- [MemNet: A Persistent Memory Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02209/) (2017)
- [Advances in Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05597/) (2017)
- [CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07761/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Denoising Algorithms with Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01313/) (2017)
- [Trainable Nonlinear Reaction Diffusion: A Flexible Framework for Fast and Effective Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.02848/) (2015)
- [Real Image Denoising with Feature Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07396/) (2019)
- [Non-Local Recurrent Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02919/) (2018)
- [A Physics-based Noise Formation Model for Extreme Low-light Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12751/) (2020)
- [Variational Denoising Network: Toward Blind Noise Modeling and Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11314/) (2019)
- [Noise Flow: Noise Modeling with Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08453/) (2019)
- [Neural Nearest Neighbors Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12575/) (2018)
- [Transfer Learning from Synthetic to Real-Noise Denoising with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11244/) (2020)
- [Seven ways to improve example-based single image super resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02228/) (2015)
- [A Trilateral Weighted Sparse Coding Scheme for Real-World Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04364/) (2018)
- [Deep Amortized Inference for Probabilistic Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05735/) (2016)
- [One Size Fits All: Can We Train One Denoiser for All Noise Levels?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09627/) (2020)
- [Deep Universal Blind Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07017/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance on image denoising with the help of large-scale datasets. Earlier methods naively trained a single CNN with many pairs of clean-noisy images. However, the conditional distribution of the clean image given a noisy one is too complicated and diverse, so that a single CNN cannot well learn such distributions. Therefore, there have also been some methods that exploit additional noise level parameters or train a separate CNN for a specific noise level parameter. These methods separate the original problem into easier sub-problems and thus have shown improved performance than the naively trained CNN. In this step, we raise two questions. The first one is whether it is an optimal approach to relate the conditional distribution only to noise level parameters. The second is what if we do not have noise level information, such as in a real-world scenario. To answer the questions and provide a better solution, we propose a novel Bayesian framework based on the variational approximation of objective functions. This enables us to separate the complicated target distribution into simpler sub-distributions. Eventually, the denoising CNN can conquer noise from each sub-distribution, which is generally an easier problem than the original. Experiments show that the proposed method provides remarkable performance on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and real-noise denoising while requiring fewer parameters than recent state-of-the-art denoisers.