# A Study of the Limits of Collaborative DCT-Based Image Denoising via Interpretable Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29334/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (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)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13751/) (2020)
- [Noise2Void - Learning Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10980/) (2018)
- [The Little Engine that Could: Regularization by Denoising (RED)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02862/) (2016)
- [Noise2Self: Blind Denoising by Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11365/) (2019)
- [MemNet: A Persistent Memory Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02209/) (2017)
- [HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/) (2021)
- [Trainable Nonlinear Reaction Diffusion: A Flexible Framework for Fast and Effective Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.02848/) (2015)
- [Real Image Denoising with Feature Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07396/) (2019)
- [Learning Proximal Operators: Using Denoising Networks for Regularizing Inverse Imaging Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03488/) (2017)
- [Neural Nearest Neighbors Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12575/) (2018)
- [Image Denoising: The Deep Learning Revolution and Beyond -- A Survey Paper --](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03362/) (2023)
- [Spatial-Adaptive Network for Single Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10291/) (2020)
- [ADMM-Net: A Deep Learning Approach for Compressive Sensing MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06869/) (2017)
- [DCT2net: an interpretable shallow CNN for image denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14803/) (2021)
- [Patch-Based Stochastic Attention for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03163/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image denoising remains a fundamental problem in image restoration, with applications in photography, biomedical, and scientific imaging. Modern deep neural networks achieve strong performance by learning powerful image priors, but often rely on large black-box models with limited interpretability. In contrast, DCT-based sliding-window and collaborative filtering methods such as BM3D offer clear algorithmic structure, but depend on handcrafted and non-differentiable operations. This work studies how far such structured collaborative filtering principles can be pushed when reformulated as trainable models. We introduce DeepBM3D, a compact fully differentiable architecture that combines non-local patch grouping, DCT-domain filtering, and multi-stage refinement within a BM3D-inspired pipeline. Lightweight convolutional feature extractors guide patch grouping, while filtering is performed through learned Wiener weights in the DCT domain. Experiments show that DeepBM3D improves over classical and hybrid baselines, remains competitive with FFDNet at low and moderate noise levels, and performs particularly well on repetitive textures.