A model-driven network for guided image denoising

Guided image denoising recovers clean target images by fusing guidance images and noisy target images. Several deep neural networks have been designed for this task, but they are black-box methods lacking interpretability. To overcome the issue, this paper builds a more interpretable network. To start with, an observation model is proposed to account for modality gap between target and guidance images. Then, this paper formulates a deep prior regularized optimization problem, and solves it by alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. The update rules are generalized to design the network architecture. Extensive experiments conducted on FAIP and RNS datasets manifest that the novel network outperforms several state-of-the-art and benchmark methods regarding both evaluation metrics and visual inspection.