Real-World Mobile Image Denoising Dataset with Efficient Baselines

Roman Flepp, Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 22368-22377

The recently increased role of mobile photography has raised the standards of on-device photo processing tremendously. Despite the latest advancements in camera hardware the mobile camera sensor area cannot be increased significantly due to physical constraints leading to a pixel size of 0.6--2.0 \mum which results in strong image noise even in moderate lighting conditions. In the era of deep learning one can train a CNN model to perform robust image denoising. However there is still a lack of a substantially diverse dataset for this task. To address this problem we introduce a novel Mobile Image Denoising Dataset (MIDD) comprising over 400000 noisy / noise-free image pairs captured under various conditions by 20 different mobile camera sensors. Additionally we propose a new DPreview test set consisting of data from 294 different cameras for precise model evaluation. Furthermore we present the efficient baseline model SplitterNet for the considered mobile image denoising task that achieves high numerical and visual results while being able to process 8MP photos directly on smartphone GPUs in under one second. Thereby outperforming models with similar runtimes. This model is also compatible with recent mobile NPUs demonstrating an even higher speed when deployed on them. The conducted experiments demonstrate high robustness of the proposed solution when applied to images from previously unseen sensors showing its high generalizability. The datasets code and models can be found on the official project website.