# IDR: Self-Supervised Image Denoising via Iterative Data Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14358/

## Key facts

- Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Learning to See in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01934/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11127/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Neighbor2Neighbor: Self-Supervised Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02824/) (2021)
- [High-Quality Self-Supervised Deep Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10277/) (2019)
- [Burst Denoising with Kernel Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02327/) (2017)
- [A Physics-based Noise Formation Model for Extreme Low-light Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12751/) (2020)
- [Noisier2Noise: Learning to Denoise from Unpaired Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11908/) (2019)
- [Noise Flow: Noise Modeling with Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08453/) (2019)
- [Unpaired Learning of Deep Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13711/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Noise Synthesis and Modeling in Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04756/) (2021)
- [NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real Image Denoising: Dataset, Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04117/) (2020)
- [Learning Camera-Aware Noise Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09370/) (2020)
- [CIE XYZ Net: Unprocessing Images for Low-Level Computer Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12709/) (2020)
- [Scale-wise Convolution for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09028/) (2019)
- [Noisy-As-Clean: Learning Self-supervised Denoising from the Corrupted Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06878/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [RestoreAgent: Autonomous Image Restoration Agent via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18035/) (2024)
- [KBNet: Kernel Basis Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02881/) (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)
- [Adaptive Dynamic Filtering Network for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12051/) (2022)
- [Distilling Semantic Priors from SAM to Efficient Image Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16368/) (2024)
- [DynamicISP: Dynamically Controlled Image Signal Processor for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01146/) (2022)
- [Multi-Agent Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09403/) (2025)
- [Rawgment: Noise-Accounted RAW Augmentation Enables Recognition in a Wide Variety of Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16046/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Image Restoration with Blurry and Noisy Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07317/) (2022)
- [Learning Distortion Invariant Representation for Image Restoration from A Causality Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06859/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Score Priors Guided Deep Variational Inference for Unsupervised Real-World Single Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04682/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Image Denoising for Real-World Images with Context-aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01627/) (2023)
- [IDF-CR: Iterative Diffusion Process for Divide-and-Conquer Cloud Removal in Remote-sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11870/) (2024)
- [IDF: Iterative Dynamic Filtering Networks for Generalizable Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19649/) (2025)
- [SVNR: Spatially-variant Noise Removal with Denoising Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16052/) (2023)
- [A Comparison of Image Denoising Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08990/) (2023)
- [Multi-view Self-supervised Disentanglement for General Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05049/) (2023)
- [A Deep Learning Method for Simultaneous Denoising and Missing Wedge Reconstruction in Cryogenic Electron Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05539/) (2023)
- [Temporal As a Plugin: Unsupervised Video Denoising with Pre-Trained Image Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11256/) (2024)
- [Positive2Negative: Breaking the Information-Lossy Barrier in Self-Supervised Single Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16460/) (2024)
- [Delving Deep into Engagement Prediction of Short Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00289/) (2024)
- [YOND: Practical Blind Raw Image Denoising Free from Camera-Specific Data Dependency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03645/) (2025)
- [Masked Pre-training Enables Universal Zero-shot Denoiser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14966/) (2024)
- [DiffDenoise: Self-Supervised Medical Image Denoising with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00264/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Infrared Vision: Progressive Prompt Fusion Network and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09343/) (2025)
- [Tell Me What You See: Text-Guided Real-World Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10191/) (2023)
- [Scene Structure Guidance Network: Unfolding Graph Partitioning into Pixel-Wise Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00555/) (2023)
- [Additive Logistic Mechanism for Privacy-Preserving Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12430/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The lack of large-scale noisy-clean image pairs restricts supervised denoising methods' deployment in actual applications. While existing unsupervised methods are able to learn image denoising without ground-truth clean images, they either show poor performance or work under impractical settings (e.g., paired noisy images). In this paper, we present a practical unsupervised image denoising method to achieve state-of-the-art denoising performance. Our method only requires single noisy images and a noise model, which is easily accessible in practical raw image denoising. It performs two steps iteratively: (1) Constructing a noisier-noisy dataset with random noise from the noise model; (2) training a model on the noisier-noisy dataset and using the trained model to refine noisy images to obtain the targets used in the next round. We further approximate our full iterative method with a fast algorithm for more efficient training while keeping its original high performance. Experiments on real-world, synthetic, and correlated noise show that our proposed unsupervised denoising approach has superior performances over existing unsupervised methods and competitive performance with supervised methods. In addition, we argue that existing denoising datasets are of low quality and contain only a small number of scenes. To evaluate raw image denoising performance in real-world applications, we build a high-quality raw image dataset SenseNoise-500 that contains 500 real-life scenes. The dataset can serve as a strong benchmark for better evaluating raw image denoising. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/zhangyi-3/IDR