Image denoising using deep CNN with batch renormalization

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have attracted great attention in the field of image denoising. However, there are two drawbacks: (1) it is very difficult to train a deeper CNN for denoising tasks, and (2) most of deeper CNNs suffer from performance saturation. In this paper, we report the design of a novel network called a batch-renormalization denoising network (BRDNet). Specifically, we combine two networks to increase the width of the network, and thus obtain more features. Because batch renormalization is fused into BRDNet, we can address the internal covariate shift and small mini-batch problems. Residual learning is also adopted in a holistic way to facilitate the network training. Dilated convolutions are exploited to extract more information for denoising tasks. Extensive experimental results show that BRDNet outperforms state-of-the-art image-denoising methods. The code of BRDNet is accessible at http://www.yongxu.org/lunwen.html.