FBI-Denoiser: Fast Blind Image Denoiser for Poisson-Gaussian Noise

We consider the challenging blind denoising problem for Poisson-Gaussian noise, in which no additional information about clean images or noise level parameters is available. Particularly, when only "single" noisy images are available for training a denoiser, the denoising performance of existing methods was not satisfactory. Recently, the blind pixelwise affine image denoiser (BP-AIDE) was proposed and significantly improved the performance in the above setting, to the extent that it is competitive with denoisers which utilized additional information. However, BP-AIDE seriously suffered from slow inference time due to the inefficiency of noise level estimation procedure and that of the blind-spot network (BSN) architecture it used. To that end, we propose Fast Blind Image Denoiser (FBI-Denoiser) for Poisson-Gaussian noise, which consists of two neural network models; 1) PGE-Net that estimates Poisson-Gaussian noise parameters 2000 times faster than the conventional methods and 2) FBI-Net that realizes a much more efficient BSN for pixelwise affine denoiser in terms of the number of parameters and inference speed. Consequently, we show that our FBI-Denoiser blindly trained solely based on single noisy images can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on several real-world noisy image benchmark datasets with much faster inference time (× 10), compared to BP-AIDE.