A note on patch-based low-rank minimization for fast image denoising

Patch-based low-rank minimization for image processing attracts much attention in recent years. The minimization of the matrix rank coupled with the Frobenius norm data fidelity can be solved by the hard thresholding filter with principle component analysis (PCA) or singular value decomposition (SVD). Based on this idea, we propose a patch-based low-rank minimization method for image denoising. The main denoising process is stated in three equivalent way: PCA, SVD and low-rank minimization. Compared to recent patch-based sparse representation methods, experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is rather rapid, and it is effective for a variety of natural grayscale images and color images, especially for texture parts in images. Further improvements of this method are also given. In addition, due to the simplicity of this method, we could provide an explanation of the choice of the threshold parameter, estimation of PSNR values, and give other insights into this method.Comment: 4pages (two columns

An ELU Network with Total Variation for Image Denoising

In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) for image denoising, which uses exponential linear unit (ELU) as the activation function. We investigate the suitability by analyzing ELU's connection with trainable nonlinear reaction diffusion model (TNRD) and residual denoising. On the other hand, batch normalization (BN) is indispensable for residual denoising and convergence purpose. However, direct stacking of BN and ELU degrades the performance of CNN. To mitigate this issue, we design an innovative combination of activation layer and normalization layer to exploit and leverage the ELU network, and discuss the corresponding rationale. Moreover, inspired by the fact that minimizing total variation (TV) can be applied to image denoising, we propose a TV regularized L2 loss to evaluate the training effect during the iterations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments, showing that our model outperforms some recent and popular approaches on Gaussian denoising with specific or randomized noise levels for both gray and color images.Comment: 10 pages, Accepted by the 24th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (2017

Enhanced CNN for image denoising

Owing to flexible architectures of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), CNNs are successfully used for image denoising. However, they suffer from the following drawbacks: (i) deep network architecture is very difficult to train. (ii) Deeper networks face the challenge of performance saturation. In this study, the authors propose a novel method called enhanced convolutional neural denoising network (ECNDNet). Specifically, they use residual learning and batch normalisation techniques to address the problem of training difficulties and accelerate the convergence of the network. In addition, dilated convolutions are used in the proposed network to enlarge the context information and reduce the computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the ECNDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for image denoising.Comment: CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology[J], 201