Optimized Normalization for Unsupervised Learning-based Image Denoising

Abstract

Recently, deep learning-based denoising approaches have been actively studied. In particular, with the advances of blind denoising techniques, it become possible to train a deep learning-based denoising model only with noisy images in an image domain where it is impossible to obtain a clean image. We no longer require pairs of a clean image and a noisy image to obtain a restored clean image from the observation. However, it is difficult to recover the target using a deep learning-based denoising model trained by only noisy images if the distribution of the noisy image is far from the distribution of the clean image. To address this limitation, unpaired image denoising approaches have recently been studied that can learn the denoising model from unpaired data of the noisy image and the clean image. ISCL showed comparable performance close to that of supervised learning-based models based on pairs of clean and noisy images. In this study, we propose suitable normalization techniques for each purpose of architectures (e.g., generator, discriminator, and extractor) of ISCL. We demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art unpaired image denoising approaches including ISCL.