Learning Raw Image Denoising Using a Parametric Color Image Model

Deep learning methods for image restoration have produced impressive results over recent years. Nevertheless, they generalize poorly and need large learning image datasets to be collected for each new acquisition modality. In order to avoid the building of such datasets, it has been recently proposed to develop synthetic image datasets for training image restoration methods, using scale invariant dead leaves models. While the geometry of such models can be successfully encoded with only a few parameters, the color content cannot be straightforwardly encoded. In this paper, we leverage the concept of color lines prior to build a light parametric color model relying on a chromaticity/luminance factorization. Further, we show that the corresponding synthetic dataset can be used to train neural networks for the denoising of RAW images from different camera-phones, without using any image from these devices. This shows the potential of our approach to increase the generalization capacity of learning-based denoising approaches in real case scenarios.