Enhanced CNN for image denoising

Due to the flexible architectures of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are successfully used for image denoising. However, they suffer from the following drawbacks: (1) deep network architecture is very difficult to be train. (2) Very deep networks face the challenge of performance saturation. In this paper, we propose a novel method called enhanced convolutional neural denoising network (ECNDNet). Specifically, we use residual learning and batch normalization (BN) techniques to address the problem of training difficulties and accelerate the convergence of the network. In addition, dilated convolutions are used in our network to enlarge the context information and reduce the computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ECNDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods such as IRCNN for image denoising.