On Combining CNN With Non-Local Self-Similarity Based Image Denoising Methods

Despite the significant advances in convolutional neural network (CNN) based image denoising, the existing methods still cannot consistently outperform non-local self-similarity (NSS) based methods, especially on images with many repetitive structures. Although several studies have been given to incorporate NSS priors with CNN-based denoising,their improvement is generally insignificant when compared with the state-of-the-art CNN-based denoisers. In this paper, we suggest to combine CNN and NSS based methods for improved image denoising, resulting in an NSS-UNet architecture. Motivated by gradient descent inference of TNRD, both the current estimate and noisy observation are considered as the inputs to the CNN. To take the NSS prior into account, the result by NSS (e.g., BM3D or WNNM), is adopted as the initial estimate. And a modified UNet is presented for exploiting the multi-scale information. We evaluate the proposed method on three common testing datasets. The results clearly show that NSS-UNet outperforms the existing CNN and NSS based methods in terms of both PSNR index and visual quality.