Structure Aggregation for Cross-Spectral Stereo Image Guided Denoising

To obtain clean images with salient structures from noisy observations, a growing trend in current denoising studies is to seek the help of additional guidance images with high signal-to-noise ratios, which are often acquired in different spectral bands such as near infrared. Although previous guided denoising methods basically require the input images to be well-aligned, a more common way to capture the paired noisy target and guidance images is to exploit a stereo camera system. However, current studies on cross-spectral stereo matching cannot fully guarantee the pixel-level registration accuracy, and rarely consider the case of noise contamination. In this work, for the first time, we propose a guided denoising framework for cross-spectral stereo images. Instead of aligning the input images via conventional stereo matching, we aggregate structures from the guidance image to estimate a clean structure map for the noisy target image, which is then used to regress the final denoising result with a spatially variant linear representation model. Based on this, we design a neural network, called as SANet, to complete the entire guided denoising process. Experimental results show that, our SANet can effectively transfer structures from an unaligned guidance image to the restoration result, and outperforms state-of-the-art denoisers on various stereo image datasets. Besides, our structure aggregation strategy also shows its potential to handle other unaligned guided restoration tasks such as super-resolution and deblurring. The source code is available at https://github.com/lustrouselixir/SANet.