Recorrupted-to-Recorrupted: Unsupervised Deep Learning for Image Denoising

Deep denoiser, the deep network for denoising, has been the focus of the recent development on image denoising. In the last few years, there is an increasing interest in developing unsupervised deep denoisers which only call unorganized noisy images without ground truth for training. Nevertheless, the performance of these unsupervised deep denoisers is not competitive to their supervised counterparts. Aiming at developing a more powerful unsupervised deep denoiser, this paper proposed a data augmentation technique, called recorrupted-to-recorrupted (R2R), to address the overfitting caused by the absence of truth images. For each noisy image, we showed that the cost function defined on the noisy/noisy image pairs constructed by the R2R method is statistically equivalent to its supervised counterpart defined on the noisy/truth image pairs. Extensive experiments showed that the proposed R2R method noticeably outperformed existing unsupervised deep denoisers, and is competitive to representative supervised deep denoisers.