Training deep learning based denoisers without ground truth data

Recently developed deep-learning-based denoisers often outperform state-of-the-art conventional denoisers, such as the BM3D. They are typically trained to minimizethe mean squared error (MSE) between the output image of a deep neural networkand a ground truth image. In deep learning based denoisers, it is important to use high quality noiseless ground truth data for high performance, but it is often challenging or even infeasible to obtain noiseless images in application areas such as hyperspectral remote sensing and medical imaging. In this article, we propose a method based on Stein’s unbiased risk estimator (SURE) for training deep neural network denoisers only based on the use of noisy images. We demonstrate that our SURE-based method, without the use of ground truth data, is able to train deep neural network denoisers to yield performances close to those networks trained with ground truth, and to outperform the state-of-the-art denoiser BM3D. Further improvements were achieved when noisy test images were used for training of denoiser networks using our proposed SURE-based method.