Residual Dilated Network with Attention for Image Blind Denoising

Image denoising has recently witnessed substantial progress. However, many existing methods remain suboptimal for texture restoration due to treating different image regions and channels indiscriminately. Also they need to specify the noise level in advance, which largely hinders their use in blind denoising. Therefore, we introduce both attention mechanism and automatic noise level estimation into image denoising. Specifically, we propose a new, effective end-to-end attention-embedded neural network for image denoising, named as Residual Dilated Attention Network (RDAN). Our RDAN is composed of a series of tailored Residual Dilated Attention Blocks (RDAB) and Residual Conv Attention Blocks (RCAB). The RDAB and RCAB incorporates both non-local and local operations, which enable a comprehensive capture of structural information. In addition, we incorporate a Gaussian-based noise level estimation into RDAN to accomplish blind denoising. Experimental results have demonstrated that our RDAN can substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art denoising methods as well as promisingly preserve image texture.