LG-BPN: Local and Global Blind-Patch Network for Self-Supervised Real-World Denoising

Abstract: Despite the significant results on synthetic noise under simplified assumptions, most self-supervised denoising methods fail under real noise due to the strong spatial noise correlation, including the advanced self-supervised blind-spot networks (BSNs). For recent methods targeting real-world denoising, they either suffer from ignoring this spatial correlation, or are limited by the destruction of fine textures for under-considering the correlation. In this paper, we present a novel method called LG-BPN for self-supervised real-world denoising, which takes the spatial correlation statistic into our network design for local detail restoration, and also brings the long-range dependencies modeling ability to previously CNN-based BSN methods. First, based on the correlation statistic, we propose a densely-sampled patch-masked convolution module. By taking more neighbor pixels with low noise correlation into account, we enable a denser local receptive field, preserving more useful information for enhanced fine structure recovery. Second, we propose a dilated Transformer block to allow distant context exploitation in BSN. This global perception addresses the intrinsic deficiency of BSN, whose receptive field is constrained by the blind spot requirement, which can not be fully resolved by the previous CNN-based BSNs. These two designs enable LG-BPN to fully exploit both the detailed structure and the global interaction in a blind manner. Extensive results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method. https://github.com/Wang-XIaoDingdd/LGBPN