Perception-based Image Denoising via Generative Compression

Abstract: Image denoising aims to remove noise while preserving structural details and perceptual realism, yet distortion-driven methods often produce over-smoothed reconstructions, especially under strong noise and distribution shift. This paper proposes a generative compression framework for perception-based denoising, where restoration is achieved by reconstructing from entropy-coded latent representations that enforce low-complexity structure, while generative decoders recover realistic textures via perceptual measures such as learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) loss and Wasserstein distance. Two complementary instantiations are introduced: (i) a conditional Wasserstein GAN (WGAN)-based compression denoiser that explicitly controls the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) trade-off, and (ii) a conditional diffusion-based reconstruction strategy that performs iterative denoising guided by compressed latents. We further establish non-asymptotic guarantees for the compression-based maximum-likelihood denoiser under additive Gaussian noise, including bounds on reconstruction error and decoding error probability. Experiments on synthetic and real-noise benchmarks demonstrate consistent perceptual improvements while maintaining competitive distortion performance.