Image denoising is still a challenging issue in many computer vision subdomains. Recent studies have shown that significant improvements are possible in a supervised setting. However, a few challenges, such as spatial fidelity and cartoon-like smoothing, remain unresolved or decisively overlooked. Our study proposes a simple yet efficient architecture for the denoising problem that addresses the aforementioned issues. The proposed architecture revisits the concept of modular concatenation instead of long and deeper cascaded connections, to recover a cleaner approximation of the given image. We find that different modules can capture versatile representations, and a concatenated representation creates a richer subspace for low-level image restoration. The proposed architecture’s number of parameters remains smaller than in most of the previous networks and still achieves significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art networks.

Ambient lighting conditions play a crucial role in determining the perceptual quality of images from photographic devices. In general, inadequate transmission light and undesired atmospheric conditions jointly degrade the image quality. If we know the desired ambient factors associated with the given low-light image, we can recover the enhanced image easily. Typical deep networks perform enhancement mappings without investigating the light distribution and color formulation properties. This leads to a lack of image instance-adaptive performance in practice. On the other hand, physical model-driven schemes suffer from the need for inherent decompositions and multiple objective minimizations. Moreover, the above approaches are rarely data efficient or free of postprediction tuning. Influenced by the above issues, this study presents a semisupervised training method using no-reference image quality metrics for low-light image restoration. We incorporate the classical haze distribution model to explore the physical properties of the given image to learn the effect of atmospheric components and minimize a single objective for restoration. We validate the performance of our network for six widely used low-light datasets. Experimental studies show that our proposed study achieves a competitive performance for no-reference metrics compared to current state-of-the-art methods. We also show the improved generalization performance of our proposed method which is efficient in preserving face identities in extreme low-light scenarios.