DnCNN

Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising

New Training and Testing Codes (Keras and PyTorch)

• DnCNN-keras

• DnCNN-pytorch

Training (MatConvNet)

• Simplenn version

  • DnCNN_TrainingCodes_v1.1

• DagNN version

  • DnCNN_TrainingCodes_DagNN_v1.1

Testing (MatConvNet or Matlab)

• [demos] Demo_test_DnCNN-.m.

• [models] including the trained models for Gaussian denoising; a single model for Gaussian denoising, single image super-resolution (SISR) and deblocking.

• [testsets] BSD68 and Set10 for Gaussian denoising evaluation; Set5, Set14, BSD100 and Urban100 datasets for SISR evaluation; Classic5 and LIVE1 for JPEG image deblocking evaluation.

New FDnCNN Models

I have trained new Flexible DnCNN (FDnCNN) models based on FFDNet.

FDnCNN can handle noise level range of [0, 75] via a single model.

Demo_FDnCNN_Gray.m

Demo_FDnCNN_Gray_Clip.m

Demo_FDnCNN_Color.m

Demo_FDnCNN_Color_Clip.m

Network Architecture and Design Rationale

• Network Architecture

  

• Batch normalization and residual learning are beneficial to Gaussian denoising (especially for a single noise level). The residual of a noisy image corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) follows a constant Gaussian distribution which stablizes batch normalization during training.

  • Histogram of noisy patches, clean patches, and residual (noise) patches from a batch of training. The noise level is 25, the patch size is 40x40, the batch size is 128.
  
  • Histogram of noisy patches, clean patches, and residual (noise) patches from another batch of training. The noise level is 25, the patch size is 40x40, the batch size is 128.
  
  • Noise-free image super-resolution does not have this property.

• Predicting the residual can be interpreted as performing one gradient descent inference step at starting point (i.e., noisy image).

  • The parameters in DnCNN are mainly representing the image priors (task-independent), thus it is possible to learn a single model for different tasks, such as image denoising, image super-resolution and JPEG image deblocking.

  • The left is the input image corrupted by different degradations, the right is the restored image by DnCNN-3.

  

Results

Gaussian Denoising

The average PSNR(dB) results of different methods on the BSD68 dataset.

Noise Level	BM3D	WNNM	EPLL	MLP	CSF	TNRD	DnCNN	DnCNN-B	FDnCNN
15	31.07	31.37	31.21	-	31.24	31.42	31.73	31.61	31.69
25	28.57	28.83	28.68	28.96	28.74	28.92	29.23	29.16	29.22
50	25.62	25.87	25.67	26.03	-	25.97	26.23	26.23	26.27

Visual Results

The left is the noisy image corrupted by AWGN, the middle is the denoised image by DnCNN, the right is the ground-truth.

Gaussian Denoising, Single ImageSuper-Resolution and JPEG Image Deblocking via a Single (DnCNN-3) Model

Average PSNR(dB)/SSIM results of different methods for Gaussian denoising with noise level 15, 25 and 50 on BSD68 dataset, single image super-resolution with upscaling factors 2, 3 and 40 on Set5, Set14, BSD100 and Urban100 datasets, JPEG image deblocking with quality factors 10, 20, 30 and 40 on Classic5 and LIVE11 datasets.

Gaussian Denoising

Dataset	Noise Level	BM3D	TNRD	DnCNN-3
	15	31.08 / 0.8722	31.42 / 0.8826	31.46 / 0.8826
BSD68	25	28.57 / 0.8017	28.92 / 0.8157	29.02 / 0.8190
	50	25.62 / 0.6869	25.97 / 0.7029	26.10 / 0.7076

Single Image Super-Resolution

Dataset	Upscaling Factor	TNRD	VDSR	DnCNN-3
	2	36.86 / 0.9556	37.56 / 0.9591	37.58 / 0.9590
Set5	3	33.18 / 0.9152	33.67 / 0.9220	33.75 / 0.9222
	4	30.85 / 0.8732	31.35 / 0.8845	31.40 / 0.8845
	2	32.51 / 0.9069	33.02 / 0.9128	33.03 / 0.9128
Set14	3	29.43 / 0.8232	29.77 / 0.8318	29.81 / 0.8321
	4	27.66 / 0.7563	27.99 / 0.7659	28.04 / 0.7672
	2	31.40 / 0.8878	31.89 / 0.8961	31.90 / 0.8961
BSD100	3	28.50 / 0.7881	28.82 / 0.7980	28.85 / 0.7981
	4	27.00 / 0.7140	27.28 / 0.7256	27.29 / 0.7253
	2	29.70 / 0.8994	30.76 / 0.9143	30.74 / 0.9139
Urban100	3	26.42 / 0.8076	27.13 / 0.8283	27.15 / 0.8276
	4	24.61 / 0.7291	25.17 / 0.7528	25.20 / 0.7521

JPEG Image Deblocking

Dataset	Quality Factor	AR-CNN	TNRD	DnCNN-3
Classic5	10	29.03 / 0.7929	29.28 / 0.7992	29.40 / 0.8026
	20	31.15 / 0.8517	31.47 / 0.8576	31.63 / 0.8610
	30	32.51 / 0.8806	32.78 / 0.8837	32.91 / 0.8861
	40	33.34 / 0.8953	-	33.77 / 0.9003
LIVE1	10	28.96 / 0.8076	29.15 / 0.8111	29.19 / 0.8123
	20	31.29 / 0.8733	31.46 / 0.8769	31.59 / 0.8802
	30	32.67 / 0.9043	32.84 / 0.9059	32.98 / 0.9090
	40	33.63 / 0.9198	-	33.96 / 0.9247

Requirements and Dependencies

• MATLAB R2015b
• Cuda-8.0 & cuDNN v-5.1
• MatConvNet

or just MATLAB R2015b to test the model. https://github.com/cszn/DnCNN/blob/4a4b5b8bcac5a5ac23433874d4362329b25522ba/Demo_test_DnCNN.m#L64-L65

Citation

@article{zhang2017beyond,
  title={Beyond a {Gaussian} denoiser: Residual learning of deep {CNN} for image denoising},
  author={Zhang, Kai and Zuo, Wangmeng and Chen, Yunjin and Meng, Deyu and Zhang, Lei},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Image Processing},
  year={2017},
  volume={26}, 
  number={7}, 
  pages={3142-3155}, 
}