On normalization-equivariance properties of supervised and unsupervised denoising methods: a survey

Abstract

Image denoising is probably the oldest and still one of the most active research topic in image processing. Many methodological concepts have been introduced in the past decades and have improved performances significantly in recent years, especially with the emergence of convolutional neural networks and supervised deep learning. In this paper, we propose a survey of guided tour of supervised and unsupervised learning methods for image denoising, classifying the main principles elaborated during this evolution, with a particular concern given to recent developments in supervised learning. It is conceived as a tutorial organizing in a comprehensive framework current approaches. We give insights on the rationales and limitations of the most performant methods in the literature, and we highlight the common features between many of them. Finally, we focus on on the normalization equivariance properties that is surprisingly not guaranteed with most of supervised methods. It is of paramount importance that intensity shifting or scaling applied to the input image results in a corresponding change in the denoiser output.