Pseudo 3D Auto-Correlation Network for Real Image Denoising

The extraction of auto-correlation in images has shown great potential in deep learning networks, such as the self-attention mechanism in the channel domain and the self-similarity mechanism in the spatial domain. However, the realization of the above mechanisms mostly requires complicated module stacking and a large number of convolution calculations, which inevitably increases model complexity and memory cost. Therefore, we propose a pseudo 3D auto-correlation network (P3AN) to explore a more efficient way of capturing contextual information in image de-noising. On the one hand, P3AN uses fast 1D convolution instead of dense connections to realize criss-cross interaction, which requires less computational resources. On the other hand, the operation does not change the feature size and makes it easy to expand. It means that only a simple adaptive fusion is needed to obtain contextual information that includes both the channel domain and the spatial domain. Our method built a pseudo 3D auto-correlation attention block through 1D convolutions and a lightweight 2D structure for more discriminative features. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three synthetic and four real noisy datasets. According to quantitative metrics and visual quality evaluation, the P3AN shows great superiority and surpasses state-of-the-art image denoising methods.