The Devil is in the Dark Pixels: Toward Brightness Bias-Robust Denoising
In this paper, we reveal an important yet overlooked problem in image denoising: under signal-dependent camera noise models, dark regions suffer from inherently low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), as signal intensity decays far faster than noise variance diminishes, making detail recovery in dark areas fundamentally challenging. Yet rather than compensating for this difficulty, MSE-trained denoisers exacerbate it -- reconstructing dark pixels up to 6x worse relative to their per-band noise floor. This bias stems from two compounding factors: signal-dependent noise inflates bright-pixel residuals, and the network's Jacobian norm increases monotonically with brightness. Together, these cause b...
| Authors | Sungjun Cho, Zhuangzhuang Chen, Xiaomeng Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 15 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 July 2026 |
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