  Variations of deep neural networks such as convolutional neural network (CNN)
have been successfully applied to image denoising. The goal is to automatically
learn a mapping from a noisy image to a clean image given training data
consisting of pairs of noisy and clean images. Most existing CNN models for
image denoising have many layers. In such cases, the models involve a large
amount of parameters and are computationally expensive to train. In this paper,
we develop a dilated residual CNN for Gaussian image denoising. Compared with
the recently proposed residual denoiser, our method can achieve comparable
performance with less computational cost. Specifically, we enlarge receptive
field by adopting dilated convolution in residual network, and the dilation
factor is set to a certain value. We utilize appropriate zero padding to make
the dimension of the output the same as the input. It has been proven that the
expansion of receptive field can boost the CNN performance in image
classification, and we further demonstrate that it can also lead to competitive
performance for denoising problem. Moreover, we present a formula to calculate
receptive field size when dilated convolution is incorporated. Thus, the change
of receptive field can be interpreted mathematically. To validate the efficacy
of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments for both gray and color image
denoising with specific or randomized noise levels. Both of the quantitative
measurements and the visual results of denoising are promising comparing with
state-of-the-art baselines.
