Lqaid: Localized Quality Aware Image Denoising Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper we propose the Localized Quality Aware Image Denoising (LQAID) technique for image denoising using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). LQAID relies on local quality estimates over global cues like noise standard deviation since the perceptual quality of a noisy image is typically spatially varying. Specifically, we use localized quality maps generated using DistNet, a spatial quality map estimation method. These quality maps are used to augment the noisy image and guide the denoising process. The augmented noisy image is denoised using a deep fully convolutional network (FCN) trained using mean square error (MSE) as the loss function. The proposed approach shows state-of-the-art performance both qualitatively and quantitatively on two vision datasets: TID 2008 and BSD500. We also show that the proposed approach possesses excellent generalization ability. Lastly, the proposed approach is completely blind since it neither requires information about the strength of the additive noise nor does it try to explicitly estimate it.