Papers › Learning to Generate Realistic Noisy Images via Pixel-level Noise-aware Adversarial Training

Learning to Generate Realistic Noisy Images via Pixel-level Noise-aware Adversarial Training

6 Apr 2022NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2204.02844archive 2025-07-28

Yuanhao Cai, Xiaowan Hu, Haoqian Wang, Yulun Zhang, Hanspeter Pfister, Donglai Wei

Existing deep learning real denoising methods require a large amount of noisy-clean image pairs for supervision. Nonetheless, capturing a real noisy-clean dataset is an unacceptable expensive and cumbersome procedure. To alleviate this problem, this work investigates how to generate realistic noisy images. Firstly, we formulate a simple yet reasonable noise model that treats each real noisy pixel as a random variable. This model splits the noisy image generation problem into two sub-problems: image domain alignment and noise domain alignment. Subsequently, we propose a novel framework, namely Pixel-level Noise-aware Generative Adversarial Network (PNGAN). PNGAN employs a pre-trained real denoiser to map the fake and real noisy images into a nearly noise-free solution space to perform image domain alignment. Simultaneously, PNGAN establishes a pixel-level adversarial training to conduct noise domain alignment. Additionally, for better noise fitting, we present an efficient architecture Simple Multi-scale Network (SMNet) as the generator. Qualitative validation shows that noise generated by PNGAN is highly similar to real noise in terms of intensity and distribution. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that a series of denoisers trained with the generated noisy images achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on four real denoising benchmarks. Part of codes, pre-trained models, and results are available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/PNGAN for comparisons.

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DAU caiyuanhao1998/PNGAN/networks/MIRNet_model.py named in the paper ran MIT (permissive) · 98fb983c7e88720b · report
DownSample caiyuanhao1998/PNGAN/networks/MIRNet_model.py named in the paper ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 38aa16cfac60cc92 · report
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downsamp caiyuanhao1998/PNGAN/networks/MIRNet_model.py named in the paper ran · metamorphic tier: invariant fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · bf2eb3936cb10010 · report
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MIRNet caiyuanhao1998/PNGAN/networks/MIRNet_model.py named in the paper unverified MIT (permissive) · 82219d825869b542 · report
MSRB caiyuanhao1998/PNGAN/networks/MIRNet_model.py named in the paper unverified MIT (permissive) · 67a302b3bbe19d09 · report
RRG caiyuanhao1998/PNGAN/networks/MIRNet_model.py named in the paper unverified MIT (permissive) · 9ddd23ff4f39e64c · report
ResidualUpSample caiyuanhao1998/PNGAN/networks/MIRNet_model.py named in the paper unverified MIT (permissive) · b6ff14afe822f838 · report
BlurPool2d GarrickZ2/Image-Denoising/PNGAN/model/generator.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: invariant fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 9cf54f0737819c78 · report
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SRG GarrickZ2/Image-Denoising/PNGAN/model/generator.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · 94c45fe09610c1f3 · report
up_sample GarrickZ2/Image-Denoising/PNGAN/model/generator.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · d133dd217f98b88c · report

Tasks

DenoisingImage DenoisingImage GenerationNoise Estimation

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Denoising DND PNGAN PSNR (sRGB) 40.18 #2 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising DND PNGAN SSIM (sRGB) 0.961 #2 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising Nam PNGAN PSNR 40.78 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising Nam PNGAN SSIM 0.986 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising PolyU PNGAN PSNR 40.55 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising PolyU PNGAN SSIM 0.983 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SIDD PNGAN PSNR (sRGB) 40.07 #5 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SIDD PNGAN SSIM (sRGB) 0.960 #5 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Noise Estimation SIDD PNGAN Average KL Divergence 0.153 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Noise Estimation SIDD PNGAN PSNR Gap 0.84 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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