Uncer2Natural: Uncertainty-Aware Unsupervised Image Denoising

Recently, unsupervised image denoising methods learning from paired noisy samples have received increasing attention. These methods build on the idea that the mean of multiple noisy images of the same scene is the ideal clean image. However, these methods ignore the effect of Aleatoric uncertainty in the noisy image (e.g., pixels deviating from the expected distribution). The presence of Aleatoric uncertainty causes degradation of the reconstructed target pixels, resulting in high uncertainty for these pixels (i.e., low confidence), which in turn leads to sub-optimal denoising results. To address this problem, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware unsupervised image denoising method named Uncer2Natural (U2N). It dynamically predicts the Aleatoric uncertainty for each noisy sample and produces satisfactory denoising results by reducing the effect of Aleatoric uncertainty. Extensive experimental results show that U2N outperforms state-of-the- art unsupervised image denoising methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and qualitative visual quality.