Abstract
Image denoising aims to enhance image quality and visual effects, finding extensive applications in various fields such as digital photography, medical imaging, video processing, and image restoration. Although deep learning-based denoising methods have made significant progress, the post-denoising results often suffer from information loss and blurring, and the network structures tend to be complex. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Multi-Scale Connected Network for Image Denoising (MSCNet) based on U-net. Specifically, this paper introduces a skip connection designed to effectively fuse shallow fine-grained information and deep semantic information, thereby improving the effects of information transmission and integration. Additionally, a channel-wise attention mechanism and a non-linear module involving point-wise multiplication of half-channel activations are presented, aiming to extract more abundant semantic features while reducing network computation. Experimental results on multiple datasets validate that, compared to other denoising methods, MSCNet demonstrates superior denoising performance.







Similar content being viewed by others
References
Chan, T.F., Wong, Chiu-Kwong.: Total variation blind deconvolution. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 7(3), 370–375 (1998)
Rudin, Leonid I., Osher, Stanley, Fatemi, Emad: Nonlinear total variation based noise removal algorithms. Physica D 60(1), 259–268 (1992)
Luo, Yu, Xu, Yong, Ji, Hui: Removing rain from a single image via discriminative sparse coding. In :2015 IEEE international conference on computer vision (ICCV), pages 3397–3405, (2015)
Mairal, Julien, Elad, Michael, Sapiro, Guillermo: Sparse representation for color image restoration. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 17(1), 53–69 (2008)
Dabov, Kostadin, Foi, Alessandro, Katkovnik, Vladimir, Egiazarian, Karen: Image denoising by sparse 3-d transform-domain collaborative filtering. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 16(8), 2080–2095 (2007)
Buades, A., Coll, B., Morel, J.-M.: A non-local algorithm for image denoising. In 2005 IEEE computer society conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR’05), volume 2, pages 60–65, (2005)
Zhang, Kai, Zuo, Wangmeng, Chen, Yunjin, Meng, Deyu, Zhang, Lei: Beyond a gaussian denoiser: Residual learning of deep CNN for image denoising. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 26(7), 3142–3155 (2017)
Chen, Liangyu, Lu, Xin, Zhang, J., Chu, Xiaojie, Chen, Chengpeng: Hinet: Half instance normalization network for image restoration. In: 2021 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition workshops (CVPRW), pages 182–192, (2021)
Guo, Shi, Yan, Zifei, Zhang, Kai, Zuo, Wangmeng, Zhang, Lei: Toward convolutional blind denoising of real photographs. In: 2019 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 1712–1722, (2019)
Anwar, Saeed, Barnes, Nick: Real image denoising with feature attention. In: 2019 IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision (ICCV), pages 3155–3164, (2019)
Zamir, Syed Waqas, Arora, Aditya, Khan, Salman, Hayat, Munawar, Khan, Fahad Shahbaz, Yang, Ming-Hsuan., Shao, Ling: Learning enriched features for fast image restoration and enhancement. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 45(2), 1934–1948 (2023)
Liang, Jingyun, Cao, Jiezhang, Sun, Guolei, Zhang, Kai, Van Gool, Luc, Timofte, Radu: Swinir: Image restoration using swin transformer. In: 2021 IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision workshops (ICCVW), pages 1833–1844, (2021)
Chen, Liangyu, Chu, Xiaojie, Zhang, Xiangyu, Sun, Jian: Simple baselines for image restoration. In: Computer Vision – ECCV 2022, pages 17–33. Springer Nature Switzerland, (2022)
Zhang, Kai, Zuo, Wangmeng, Gu, Shuhang, Zhang, Lei: Learning deep cnn denoiser prior for image restoration. In 2017 IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 2808–2817, (2017)
Zamir, Syed Waqas, Arora, Aditya, Khan, Salman, Hayat, Munawar, Khan, Fahad Shahbaz, Yang, Ming-Hsuan, Shao, Ling: Multi-stage progressive image restoration. In 2021 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 14816–14826, (2021)
Ronneberger, Olaf, Fischer, Philipp, Brox, Thomas: U-net: convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. In: medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention – MICCAI 2015, pages 234–241. Springer International Publishing, (2015)
He, Kaiming, Zhang, Xiangyu, Ren, Shaoqing, Sun, Jian: Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: 2016 IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 770–778, (2016)
Fu, Jun, Liu, Jing, Tian, Haijie, Li, Yong, Bao, Yongjun, Fang, Zhiwei, Lu, Hanqing: Dual attention network for scene segmentation. In: 2019 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 3141–3149, (2019)
Cheng, Shen, Wang, Yuzhi, Huang, Haibin, Liu, Donghao, Fan, Haoqiang, Liu, Shuaicheng: Nbnet: Noise basis learning for image denoising with subspace projection. In: 2021 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 4894–4904, (2021)
Huang, Huimin, Lin, Lanfen, Tong, Ruofeng, Hu, Hongjie, Zhang, Qiaowei, Iwamoto, Yutaro, Han, Xianhua, Chen, Yen-Wei, Wu, Jian: Unet 3+: A full-scale connected unet for medical image segmentation. In: ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP), pages 1055–1059, (2020)
Hu, Jie, Shen, Li, Sun, Gang: Squeeze-and-excitation networks. In 2018 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 7132–7141, (2018)
Zhang, Kai, Zuo, Wangmeng, Zhang, Lei: Ffdnet: Toward a fast and flexible solution for cnn-based image denoising. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 27(9), 4608–4622 (2018)
Tian, Chunwei, Yong, Xu., Li, Zuoyong, Zuo, Wangmeng, Fei, Lunke, Liu, Hong: Attention-guided CNN for image denoising. Neural Netw. 124, 117–129 (2020)
Tian, Chunwei, Yong, Xu., Zuo, Wangmeng, Bo, Du., Lin, Chia-Wen., Zhang, David: Designing and training of a dual CNN for image denoising. Knowl.-Based Syst. 226, 106949 (2021)
Shi, Miaowen, Fan, Linwei, Li, Xue-mei, Zhang, Caiming: A competent image denoising method based on structural information extraction. Vis. Comput. 39, 2407–2423 (2022)
Wencong, Wu., Liu, Shijie, Zhou, Yi., Zhang, Yungang, Xiang, Yu.: Dual residual attention network for image denoising. Pattern Recogn. 149, 110291 (2024)
Yue, Zongsheng, Yong, Hongwei, Zhao, Qian, Zhang, Lei, Meng, Deyu: Variational denoising network: toward blind noise modeling and removal. arXiv:1908.11314, (2019)
Chang, Meng, Li, Qi, Feng, Huajun, Xu, Zhi-hai: Spatial-adaptive network for single image denoising. arXiv:2001.10291, (2020)
Yue, Zongsheng, Zhao, Qian, Zhang, Lei, Meng, Deyu: Dual adversarial network: toward real-world noise removal and noise generation. arXiv:2007.05946, (2020)
Zamir, Syed Waqas, Arora, Aditya, Khan, Salman, Hayat, Munawar, Khan, Fahad Shahbaz, Yang, Ming-Hsuan, Shao, Ling: Cycleisp: Real image restoration via improved data synthesis. In: 2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 2693–2702, (2020)
Ren, Chao, He, Xiaohai, Wang, Chuncheng, Zhao, Zhibo: Adaptive consistency prior based deep network for image denoising. In: 2021 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 8592–8602, (2021)
Wang, Zhendong, Cun, Xiaodong, Bao, Jianmin, Zhou, Wengang, Liu, Jianzhuang, Li, Houqiang: Uformer: A general u-shaped transformer for image restoration. In: 2022 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pages 17662–17672, (2022)
Jun, Xu., Zhang, Lei, Zhang, David: A trilateral weighted sparse coding scheme for real-world image denoising. Comput. Vision - ECCV 2018, 21–38 (2018)
El Helou, Majed, Süsstrunk, Sabine: Blind universal bayesian image denoising with gaussian noise level learning. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 29, 4885–4897 (2020)
Zhang, Kai, Li, Yawei, Zuo, Wangmeng, Zhang, Lei, Van Gool, Luc, Timofte, Radu: Plug-and-play image restoration with deep denoiser prior. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 44(10), 6360–6376 (2022)
Funding
The authors declare that no funds.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Gao, L., Jin, X., Zhang, Y. et al. MSCNet: multi-scale connected network for image denoising. SIViP 19, 427 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-025-03981-4
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-025-03981-4