DnM3Net: Multi-Scale & Multi-Level Shuffle-CNN Via Multi-Level Attention for Image Denoising

Recently, based on novel convolutional neural net-work architectures proposed, tremendous advances have been achieved in image denoising task. An effective and efficient multi-level network architecture for image denoising refers to restore the latent clean image from a coarser scale to finer scales and pass features through multiple levels of the model. Unfortunately, the bottleneck of applying multi-level network architecture lies in the multi-scale information from input images is not effectively captured and the fine-to-coarse feature fusion strategy to be ignored in image denoising task. To solve these problems, we propose a multi-scale & multi-level shuffle-CNN Via multi-level attention (DnM3Net), which plugs the multi-scale feature extraction, fine-to-coarse feature fusion strategy and multi-level attention module into the new network architecture in image denoising task. The advantage of this approach are two-fold: (1) It solve the multi-scale information extraction issue of multi-level network architecture, making it more effective and efficient for the image denoising task. (2) It is impressive performance because the better trade-off between denoising and detail preservation. The proposed novel network architecture is validated by applying on synthetic gaussian noise gray and RGB images. Experimental results show that the DnM3Net effectively improve the quantitative metrics and visual quality compared to the state-of-the-art denoising methods.

I. Introduction

Image denoising, which has been studied extensively in computer vision for decades of years, plays an important role in improving the visual quality of real noisy images. The real images are often noised during complicated image generation process due to the effect of many factors such as camera pipelines, capturing sensor and transmission media [1].