Cross-Patch Graph Convolutional Network for Image Denoising

Recently, deep learning-based image denoising methods have achieved significant improvements over traditional methods. Due to the hardware limitation, most deep learning-based image denoising methods utilize cropped small patches to train a convolutional neural network to infer the clean images. However, the real noisy images in practical are mostly of high resolution rather than the cropped small patches and the vanilla training strategies ignore the cross-patch contextual dependency in the whole image. In this paper, we propose Cross-Patch Net (CPNet), which is the first deep-learning-based real image denoising method for HR (high resolution) input. Furthermore, we design a novel loss guided by the noise level map to obtain better performance. Compared with the vanilla patch-based training strategies, our approach effectively exploits the cross-patch contextual dependency. Besides, owing to the difficulty in capturing real noisy and noise-free image paired training data, we propose an effective method to generate realistic sRGB noisy images from their corresponding clean sRGB images for denoiser training. Denoising experiments on real-world sRGB images show the effectiveness of the proposed method. More importantly, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on practical sRGB noisy image denoising.