Rethinking Reconstruction and Denoising in the Dark: New Perspective, General Architecture and Beyond

Abstract

Recently, enhancing image quality in the original RAW domain has garnered significant attention, with denoising and reconstruction emerging as fundamental tasks. Although some works attempt to couple these tasks, they primarily focus on cascade learning while neglecting task associativity within a broader parameter space, leading to suboptimal performance. This work introduces a novel approach by rethinking denoising and reconstruction from a "backbone-head" perspective, leveraging the stronger shared parameter space offered by the backbone, compared to the encoder used in existing works. We derive task-specific heads with fewer parameters to mitigate learning pressure. By incorporating chromaticity-and-noise perception module into the backbone and introducing task-specific supervision during training, we enable simultaneous high-quality results for reconstruction and denoising. Additionally, we design a dual-head interaction module to capture the latent correspondence between the two tasks, significantly enhancing multi-task accuracy. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/csmty/CANS.