Fully Symmetric Convolutional Network for Effective Image Denoising

Abstract

Neural-network-based image denoising is one of the promising approaches to deal with problems in image processing. In this work, a deep fully symmetric convolutional–deconvolutional neural network (FSCN) is proposed for image denoising. The proposed model comprises a novel architecture with a chain of successive symmetric convolutional–deconvolutional layers. This framework learns convolutional–deconvolutional mappings from corrupted images to the clean ones in an end-to-end fashion without using image priors. The convolutional layers act as feature extractor to encode primary components of the image contents while eliminating corruptions, and the deconvolutional layers then decode the image abstractions to recover the image content details. An adaptive moment optimizer is used to minimize the reconstruction loss as it is appropriate for large data and noisy images. Extensive experiments were conducted for image denoising to evaluate the FSCN model against the existing state-of-the-art denoising algorithms. The results show that the proposed model achieves superior denoising, both qualitatively and quantitatively. This work also presents the efficient implementation of the FSCN model by using GPU computing which makes it easy and attractive for practical denoising applications.