| Summary: | Despite rapid advances in the field of image denoising, heavy noise removal has remained an under-explored area. When the strength of noise becomes comparable to or even more dominating than that of signal, restoration of important structures from such heavily-contaminated images becomes more challenging. Existing model-based and learning-based image denoising techniques often cannot delivery satisfactory results, which call for new insights and algorithmic tools. In this paper, we propose to remove heavy noise with the help of similar images retrieved from datasets, which leads to a hybrid approach combining sparsity-based and learning-based methods. Specifically, the parametric sparse prior of underlying clean image is learned from the retrieved reference images and the input noisy image. Leveraging prior from the reference images, the estimated parametric model contains much more accurate information of image details. When compared against existing conventional methods, the proposed hybrid approach is more capable of restoring fine-detailed structures in the presence of heavy noise. Experimental results show that the proposed method dramatically outperforms current state-of-the-art image denoising methods both subjectively and objectively.
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