A Residual UNet Denoising Network Based on Multi-Scale Feature Extraction and Attention-Guided Filter

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Aug 9;23(16):7044. doi: 10.3390/s23167044.

Abstract

In order to obtain high-quality images, it is very important to remove noise effectively and retain image details reasonably. In this paper, we propose a residual UNet denoising network that adds the attention-guided filter and multi-scale feature extraction blocks. We design a multi-scale feature extraction block as the input block to expand the receiving domain and extract more useful features. We also develop the attention-guided filter block to hold the edge information. Further, we use the global residual network strategy to model residual noise instead of directly modeling clean images. Experimental results show our proposed network performs favorably against several state-of-the-art models. Our proposed model can not only suppress the noise more effectively, but also improve the sharpness of the image.

Keywords: UNet; attention-guided filter; image denoising; multi-scale feature; residual network.