# Two-stage Progressive Residual Dense Attention Network for Image Denoising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02831/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Stacked Hierarchical Multi-patch Network for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03468/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Spatially-Attentive Patch-Hierarchical Network for Adaptive Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05343/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Transfer Learning from Synthetic to Real-Noise Denoising with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11244/) (2020)
- [Lightweight Pyramid Networks for Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06173/) (2018)
- [Spatial-Adaptive Network for Single Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10291/) (2020)
- [A Trilateral Weighted Sparse Coding Scheme for Real-World Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04364/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image denoising can effectively exploit rich hierarchical features and have achieved great success. However, many deep CNN-based denoising models equally utilize the hierarchical features of noisy images without paying attention to the more important and useful features, leading to relatively low performance. To address the issue, we design a new Two-stage Progressive Residual Dense Attention Network (TSP-RDANet) for image denoising, which divides the whole process of denoising into two sub-tasks to remove noise progressively. Two different attention mechanism-based denoising networks are designed for the two sequential sub-tasks: the residual dense attention module (RDAM) is designed for the first stage, and the hybrid dilated residual dense attention module (HDRDAM) is proposed for the second stage. The proposed attention modules are able to learn appropriate local features through dense connection between different convolutional layers, and the irrelevant features can also be suppressed. The two sub-networks are then connected by a long skip connection to retain the shallow feature to enhance the denoising performance. The experiments on seven benchmark datasets have verified that compared with many state-of-the-art methods, the proposed TSP-RDANet can obtain favorable results both on synthetic and real noisy image denoising. The code of our TSP-RDANet is available at https://github.com/WenCongWu/TSP-RDANet.