Zero-Shot Noise2Noise: Efficient Image Denoising without any Data

Abstract: Recently, self-supervised neural networks have shown excellent image denoising performance. However, current dataset free methods are either computationally expensive, require a noise model, or have inadequate image quality. In this work we show that a simple 2-layer network, without any training data or knowledge of the noise distribution, can enable high-quality image denoising at low computational cost. Our approach is motivated by Noise2Noise and Neighbor2Neighbor and works well for denoising pixel-wise independent noise. Our experiments on artificial, real-world camera, and microscope noise show that our method termed ZS-N2N (Zero Shot Noise2Noise) often outperforms existing dataset-free methods at a reduced cost, making it suitable for use cases with scarce data availability and limited compute resources. A demo of our implementation including our code and hyperparameters can be found in the following colab notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1i82nyizTdszyHkaHBuKPbWnTzao8HF9b