Deep class-aware image denoising

The increasing demand for high image quality in mobile devices brings forth the need for better computational enhancement techniques, and image denoising in particular. To this end, we propose a new fully convolutional deep neural network architecture which is simple yet powerful and achieves state-of-the-art performance for additive Gaussian noise removal. Furthermore, we claim that the personal photo-collections can usually be categorized into a small set of semantic classes. However simple, this observation has not been exploited in image denoising until now. We show that a significant boost in performance of up to 0.4dB PSNR can be achieved by making our network class-aware, namely, by fine-tuning it for images belonging to a specific semantic class. Relying on the hugely successful existing image classifiers, this research advocates for using a class-aware approach in all image enhancement tasks.