Practical Real Video Denoising with Realistic Degradation Model

Existing video denoising methods typically assume noisy videos are degraded from clean videos by adding Gaussian noise. However, deep models trained on such a degradation assumption will inevitably give rise to poor performance for real videos due to degradation mismatch. Although some studies attempt to train deep models on noisy and noise-free video pairs captured by cameras, such models can only work well for specific cameras and do not generalize well for other videos. In this paper, we propose to lift this limitation and focus on the problem of general real video denoising with the aim to generalize well on unseen real-world videos. We tackle this problem by firstly investigating the common behaviors of video noises and observing two important characteristics: 1) downscaling helps to reduce the noise level in spatial space and 2) the information from the adjacent frames help to remove the noise of current frame in temporal space. Motivated by these two observations, we propose a multi-scale recurrent architecture by making full use of the above two characteristics. Secondly, we propose a synthetic real noise degradation model by randomly shuffling different noise types to train the denoising model. With a synthesized and enriched degradation space, our degradation model can help to bridge the distribution gap between training data and real-world data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance and better generalization ability than existing methods on both synthetic Gaussian denoising and practical real video denoising.