# Dual Residual Attention Network for Image Denoising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04269 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04269/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (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)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13751/) (2020)
- [Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks for Fast and Accurate Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03915/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03264/) (2017)
- [Deeply-Recursive Convolutional Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04491/) (2015)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Network for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10985/) (2020)
- [Residual Non-local Attention Networks for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10082/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10477/) (2018)
- [Real Image Denoising with Feature Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07396/) (2019)
- [Understanding Convolution for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08502/) (2017)
- [Batch Renormalization: Towards Reducing Minibatch Dependence in Batch-Normalized Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03275/) (2017)
- [Variational Denoising Network: Toward Blind Noise Modeling and Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11314/) (2019)
- [Dual Adversarial Network: Toward Real-world Noise Removal and Noise Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05946/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Multi-Scale Representation Learning for Image Restoration with State-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10145/) (2024)
- [Learning Multi-scale Spatial-frequency Features for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16307/) (2025)
- [Beyond Image Prior: Embedding Noise Prior into Conditional Denoising Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09094/) (2024)
- [Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18644/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Image Restoration through Learning Context-Rich and Detail-Accurate Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10558/) (2025)
- [Structure Modeling Activation Free Fourier Network for Spacecraft Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07067/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In image denoising, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can obtain favorable performance on removing spatially invariant noise. However, many of these networks cannot perform well on removing the real noise (i.e. spatially variant noise) generated during image acquisition or transmission, which severely sets back their application in practical image denoising tasks. Instead of continuously increasing the network depth, many researchers have revealed that expanding the width of networks can also be a useful way to improve model performance. It also has been verified that feature filtering can promote the learning ability of the models. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Dual-branch Residual Attention Network (DRANet) for image denoising, which has both the merits of a wide model architecture and attention-guided feature learning. The proposed DRANet includes two different parallel branches, which can capture complementary features to enhance the learning ability of the model. We designed a new residual attention block (RAB) and a novel hybrid dilated residual attention block (HDRAB) for the upper and the lower branches, respectively. The RAB and HDRAB can capture rich local features through multiple skip connections between different convolutional layers, and the unimportant features are dropped by the residual attention modules. Meanwhile, the long skip connections in each branch, and the global feature fusion between the two parallel branches can capture the global features as well. Moreover, the proposed DRANet uses downsampling operations and dilated convolutions to increase the size of the receptive field, which can enable DRANet to capture more image context information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with other state-of-the-art denoising methods, our DRANet can produce competitive denoising performance both on synthetic and real-world noise removal.