NoiseNet Signal-Dependent Noise Variance Estimation with Convolutional Neural Network
Abstract
In this paper, the problem of blind estimation of uncorrelated signal-dependent noise parameters in images is formulated as a regression problem with uncertainty. It is shown that this regression task can be effectively solved by a properly trained deep convolution neural network (CNN), called NoiseNet, comprising regressor branch and uncertainty quantifier branch. The former predicts noise standard deviation (STD) for a 32 × 32 pixels image patch, while the latter predicts STD of regressor error. The NoiseNet architecture is proposed and peculiarities of its training are discussed. Signal-dependent noise parameters are estimated by robust iterative processing of many local estimates provided by the NoiseNet. The comparative analysis for real data from NED2012 database is carried out. Its results show that the NoiseNet provides accuracy better than the state-of-the-art existing methods. © 2018, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.