Simple Sparsification Improves Sparse Denoising Autoencoders in Denoising Highly Noisy Images

Recently Burger et al. (2012) and Xie et al. (2012) proposed to use a denoising autoencoder (DAE) for denoising noisy images. They showed that a plain, deep DAE can denoise noisy images as well as the conventional methods such as BM3D and KSVD. Both of them approached image denoising by denoising small, image patches of a larger image and combining them to form a clean image. In this setting, it is usual to use the encoder of the DAE to obtain the latent representation and subsequently apply the decoder to get the clean patch. We propose that a simple sparsification of the latent representation found by the encoder improves denoising performance, both when the DAE was trained with and without sparsity regularization. The experiments confirm that the proposed sparsification indeed helps both denoising a small image patch and denoising a larger image consisting of those patches. Furthermore, it is found out that the proposed method improves even classification performance when test samples are corrupted with noise.