PocketDVDNet: Realtime Video Denoising for Real Camera Noise

Abstract: Live video denoising under realistic, multi-component sensor noise remains challenging for applications such as autofocus, autonomous driving, and surveillance. We propose PocketDVDNet, a lightweight video denoiser developed using our model compression framework that combines sparsity-guided structured pruning, a physics-informed noise model, and knowledge distillation to achieve high-quality restoration with reduced resource demands. Starting from a reference model, we induce sparsity, apply targeted channel pruning, and retrain a teacher on realistic multi-component noise. The student network learns implicit noise handling, eliminating the need for explicit noise-map inputs. PocketDVDNet reduces the original model size by 74% while improving denoising quality and processing 5-frame patches in real-time. These results demonstrate that aggressive compression, combined with domain-adapted distillation, can reconcile performance and efficiency for practical, real-time video denoising.