Robust And Interpretable Blind Image Denoising Via Bias-Free Convolutional Neural Networks

Sreyas Mohan, Zahra Kadkhodaie, Eero P. Simoncelli, Carlos Fernandez-Granda

Keywords: denoising, overfitting, generalization, robustness, interpretability, analysis of neural networks

Abstract: We study the generalization properties of deep convolutional neural networks for image denoising in the presence of varying noise levels. We provide extensive empirical evidence that current state-of-the-art architectures systematically overfit to the noise levels in the training set, performing very poorly at new noise levels. We show that strong generalization can be achieved through a simple architectural modification: removing all additive constants. The resulting "bias-free" networks attain state-of-the-art performance over a broad range of noise levels, even when trained over a limited range. They are also locally linear, which enables direct analysis with linear-algebraic tools. We show that the denoising map can be visualized locally as a filter that adapts to both image structure and noise level. In addition, our analysis reveals that deep networks implicitly perform a projection onto an adaptively-selected low-dimensional subspace, with dimensionality inversely proportional to noise level, that captures features of natural images.

TL;DR: We show that removing constant terms from CNN architectures ensures strong generalization across noise levels, and also provides interpretability of the denoising method via linear-algebra techniques.

Code: [ LabForComputationalVision/bias_free_denoising](https://github.com/LabForComputationalVision/bias_free_denoising)