# A Scalable Training Strategy for Blind Multi-Distribution Noise Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20064/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [The Little Engine that Could: Regularization by Denoising (RED)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02862/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning Techniques for Inverse Problems in Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06001/) (2020)
- [Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11127/) (2018)
- [Robust and interpretable blind image denoising via bias-free convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05478/) (2019)
- [Stochastic Image Denoising by Sampling from the Posterior Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09552/) (2021)
- [One Size Fits All: Can We Train One Denoiser for All Noise Levels?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09627/) (2020)
- [Computing Multiple Image Reconstructions with a Single Hypernetwork](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11009/) (2022)
- [On-Demand Learning for Deep Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01380/) (2016)
- [D-VDAMP: Denoising-based Approximate Message Passing for Compressive MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13211/) (2020)
- [Adaptive 3D descattering with a dynamic synthesis network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00484/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent advances, developing general-purpose universal denoising and artifact-removal networks remains largely an open problem: Given fixed network weights, one inherently trades-off specialization at one task (e.g.,~removing Poisson noise) for performance at another (e.g.,~removing speckle noise). In addition, training such a network is challenging due to the curse of dimensionality: As one increases the dimensions of the specification-space (i.e.,~the number of parameters needed to describe the noise distribution) the number of unique specifications one needs to train for grows exponentially. Uniformly sampling this space will result in a network that does well at very challenging problem specifications but poorly at easy problem specifications, where even large errors will have a small effect on the overall mean squared error. In this work we propose training denoising networks using an adaptive-sampling/active-learning strategy. Our work improves upon a recently proposed universal denoiser training strategy by extending these results to higher dimensions and by incorporating a polynomial approximation of the true specification-loss landscape. This approximation allows us to reduce training times by almost two orders of magnitude. We test our method on simulated joint Poisson-Gaussian-Speckle noise and demonstrate that with our proposed training strategy, a single blind, generalist denoiser network can achieve peak signal-to-noise ratios within a uniform bound of specialized denoiser networks across a large range of operating conditions. We also capture a small dataset of images with varying amounts of joint Poisson-Gaussian-Speckle noise and demonstrate that a universal denoiser trained using our adaptive-sampling strategy outperforms uniformly trained baselines.