A Decoupled Learning Scheme for Real-world Burst Denoising from Raw Images

The recently developed burst denoising approach, which reduces noise by using multiple frames captured in a short time, has demonstrated much better denoising performance than its single-frame counterparts. However, existing learning based burst denoising methods are limited by two factors. On one hand, most of the models are trained on video sequences with synthetic noise. When applied to real-world raw image sequences, visual artifacts often appear due to the different noise statistics. On the other hand, there lacks a real-world burst denoising benchmark of dynamic scenes because the generation of clean ground-truth is very difficult due to the presence of object motions. In this paper, a novel multi-frame CNN model is carefully designed, which decouples the learning of motion from the learning of noise statistics. Consequently, an alternating learning algorithm is developed to learn how to align adjacent frames from a synthetic noisy video dataset, and learn to adapt to the raw noise statistics from real-world noisy datasets of static scenes. Finally, the trained model can be applied to real-world dynamic sequences for burst denoising. Extensive experiments on both synthetic video datasets and real-world dynamic sequences demonstrate the leading burst denoising performance of our proposed method.