Global Information Compensation Network for Image Denoising

In image denoising research, discriminative models have achieved impressive results which mainly owes to the powerful ability of convolutional networks in local feature extraction. However, there is still room for improvement due to insufficient utilization of global information. Although using fully connected layers or increasing network depth can supplement global information, this results in a significant increase in parameters and computational cost. To address these issues, we propose a global information compensation network (GICN) for image denoising in this paper. Firstly, at the shallow network part, we propose a global feature mining block that enhances the network's ability to extract global information by combining non-local blocks and the Fourier transform while improving the interpretability of the model. Secondly, between the encoder and decoder, we propose a cross-scale feature aggregation block to fuse information at different scales. Finally, we employ attention blocks to improve skip connections to better capture long-distance dependencies. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed GICN effectively compensates for global information, achieves a balance between denoising efficiency and effect, and surpasses mainstream methods in multiple benchmark tests.