SDAUNet: A simple dual attention mechanism UNet for mixed noise removal

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated impressive results in additive white Gaussian noise removal due to their strong fitting ability. However, their performance in mixed noise removal remains unsatisfactory, primarily due to their limited receptive field that focuses only on the local features of images and disregards global information. To ameliorate this issue, recent state‐of‐the‐art approaches employ attention mechanism (AM) to capture the global information. However, most AM based methods still suffer from low computational efficiency. In this paper, a novel model named simple dual attention mechanism UNet (SDAUNet) for mixed noise removal is proposed. In SDAUNet, the UNet architecture is used to gradually acquire multi‐scale image features and provide a more comprehensive and accurate representation of the image features than other CNNs. A simple dual attention convolutional block is presented to acquire the global image features that can successfully capture image details with a low burden. The experimental results demonstrate that the SDAUNet model can achieve better measurement metrics and visual performance than other state‐of‐the‐art methods.