Analog Image Denoising with an Adaptive Memristive Crossbar Network

Abstract: Noise in image sensors led to the development of a whole range of denoising filters. A noisy image can become hard to recognize and often require several types of post-processing compensation circuits. This paper proposes an adaptive denoising system implemented using an analog in-memory neural computing network. The proposed method can learn new noises and can be integrated into or alone with CMOS image sensors. Three denoising network configurations are implemented namely, (1) single layer network, (2) convolution network, and (3) fusion network. The single layer network shows the processing time, energy consumption, and on-chip area of 3.2us, 21nJ per image, and 0.3mm^2 respectively, meanwhile, the convolution denoising network correspondingly shows 72ms, 236uJ, and 0.48mm^2. Among all the implemented networks, it is observed that performance metrics SSIM, MSE, and PSNR show a maximum improvement of 3.61, 21.7, and 7.7 times respectively.