Feature-Align Network and Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Denoising

Deep learning-based RAW image denoising is a quintessential problem in image restoration. Recent works have pushed the state-of-the-art in denoising image quality. However, many of these networks are computationally too expensive for efficient use in mobile devices. Here, we propose a novel network for efficient RAW denoising on mobile devices. Our contributions are: (1) An efficient encoderdecoder network augmented with a new Feature-Align layer to attend to spatially varying noise. (2) A new perceptual Feature Loss calculated in the RAW domain to preserve high frequency image content. (3) An analysis of the use of multiple models tuned to different subranges of noise levels. (4) An open-source RAW noisy-clean paired dataset with noise modeling, to facilitate research in RAW denoising. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed network and training techniques and show results that compete with the state-ofthe-art network, while using significantly fewer parameters and MACs. On the Darmstadt Noise Dataset benchmark, we achieve a PSNR of 48.28dB, with 263× fewer MACs, and 17.6× fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art network, which achieves 49.12 dB.