Noise2Fast: Fast Self-Supervised Single Image Blind Denoising

In the last several years deep learning based approaches have come to dominate many areas of computer vision, and image denoising is no exception. Neural networks can learn by example to map noisy images to clean images. However, access to noisy/clean or even noisy/noisy image pairs isn't always readily available in the desired domain. Recent approaches have allowed for the denoising of single noisy images without access to any training data aside from that very image. But since they require both training and inference to be carried out on each individual input image, these methods require significant computation time. As such, they are difficult to integrate into automated microscopy pipelines where denoising large datasets is essential but needs to be carried out in a timely manner. Here we present Noise2Fast, a fast single image blind denoiser. Our method is tailored for speed by training on a four-image dataset produced using a unique form of downsampling we refer to as "checkerboard downsampling". Noise2Fast is faster than all tested approaches and is more accurate than all except Self2Self, which takes well over 100 times longer to denoise an image. This allows for a combination of speed and flexibility that was not previously attainable using any other method.