Diffusion-Based sRGB Real Noise Generation via Prompt-Driven Noise Representation Learning
Authors: Jaekyun Ko, Dongjin Kim, Soomin Lee, Guanghui Wang, Tae Hyun Kim
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University · Mobile Experience (MX) Division, Samsung Electronics · Department of Computer Science, Toronto Metropolitan University
Denoising in the sRGB image space is challenging due to large noise variability. Although end-to-end methods perform well, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios is limited by the scarcity of real noisy-clean image pairs, which are expensive and difficult to collect. To address this limitation, several generative methods have been developed to synthesize realistic noisy images from limited data. These approaches often rely on camera metadata during both training and testing to synthesize real-world noise. However, the lack of metadata or inconsistencies between devices restricts their usability. Therefore, we propose a novel framework called Prompt-Driven Noise Generation (PNG). This model is capable of acquiring high-dimensional prompt features that capture the characteristics of real-world input noise and creating a variety of realistic noisy images consistent with the distribution of the input noise. By eliminating the dependency on explicit camera metadata, our approach significantly enhances the generalizability and applicability of noise synthesis. Comprehensive experiments reveal that our model effectively produces realistic noisy images and show the successful application of these generated images in removing real-world noise across various benchmark datasets.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of the proposed method. (a) Training pipeline. (b) Inference pipeline.
Figure 3: (a) Sketch of the Prompt Autoencoder (PAE). (b) Details of Global and Local Prompt Blocks.
Camera
Metrics
C2N
Flow-sRGB
NeCA-W
NAFlow
Ours
G4
KLD
0.1660
0.0507
0.0242
0.0254
0.0174
AKLD
0.2007
0.1504
0.1524
0.1367
0.1283
GP
KLD
0.1315
0.0781
0.0432
0.0352
0.0143
AKLD
0.1968
0.1797
0.1273
0.1180
0.1074
IP
KLD
0.0581
0.5128
0.0410
0.0339
0.0291
AKLD
0.2929
1.7490
0.1145
0.1522
0.1128
Table 1: Quantitative results for synthetic noise on a subset of the SIDD validation set, in which the ISO values exist in the training set. The results are computed with KLD ↓ and AKLD ↓ . The best and second-best results are highlighted in bold and underline , respectively.
Figure 4: Visualization of synthetic noisy images on the SIDD validation set. From left to right: C2N, NeCA-W, NAFlow, Ours (PNG), and real noisy images.
Metrics
C2N
NoiseFlow
Flow-sRGB
NeCA-W
NAFlow
Ours
Real
PSNR ↑
33.76
33.81
34.74
36.82
37.22
37.55
37.63
SSIM ↑
0.901
0.894
0.912
0.932
0.935
0.937
0.936
Table 2: Denoising performance of DnCNN on SIDD-Benchmark in terms of PSNR ↑ and SSIM ↑ . All methods are trained with synthetic noisy-clean pairs. Note that Real indicates denoising results by training using real noisy-clean pairs. The best and second-best results are highlighted in bold and underline .
Figure 5: Visual comparison on denoising results with PSNR ↑ on SIDD validation set from DnCNN trained on each method. For more qualitative results, please refer to the supplementary material.
Model
Methods
PolyU
Nam
SIDD Validation
SIDD+
Average
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
DnCNN
Real (100%)
36.34
0.9204
35.35
0.8828
37.72
0.8905
35.68
0.8860
36.27
0.8949
NeCA-W (100%)
36.96
0.9544
35.61
0.9403
36.26
0.8812
35.42
0.8900
36.06
0.9165
NAFlow (100%)
36.85
0.9499
37.45
0.9524
37.27
0.8989
36.67
0.9249
37.06
0.9315
Ours (100%)
37.93
0.9609
38.08
0.9630
37.63
0.8960
36.23
0.9072
37.47
0.9318
NeCA-W-Mixed (50%)
37.92
0.9601
37.86
0.9580
37.51
0.8952
35.79
0.8961
37.27
0.9274
Table 3: Quantitative comparison of DnCNN denoising performance on the PolyU, Nam, SIDD validation, and SIDD+ benchmarks. The percentage (%) denotes the mixing ratio between the two training subsets. The best and second-best results are highlighted in bold and underline .
Methods
PolyU
Nam
MAI2021
Average
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
Metadata-Dependent
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
NAFlow
0.2304
1.7801
0.2055
1.9320
0.7304
2.6465
0.3888
2.1195
Ours
0.0822
0.5814
0.0966
0.4668
0.0747
0.3314
0.0845
0.4599
Table 4: Quantitative results of synthetic noise on the PolyU, Nam, and MAI2021. All methods are trained with SIDD training set. The results are computed with KLD ↓ and AKLD ↓ . The best results are shown in bold .
Test Dataset
Real (100%)
NAFlow-Mixed (50%)
Ours-Mixed (50%)
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
Nam
38.87
0.9712
39.69
0.9715
40.40
0.9761
Table 5: Quantitative denoising results on the external dataset.
Classifier
Camera Sensor (%)
Camera Sensor + ISO Level
Top-1 (%)
Top-3 (%)
Baseline (No Prompt)
75.80
66.27
93.91
GPB
82.37
68.35
94.71
GPB + LPB
94.47
75.48
98.64
Table 6: Quantitative results of metadata classification on SIDD validation with different combinations of prompt features in terms of accuracy ↑ . We test the validity of the prompt features in two aspects: camera sensor type and ISO level. The best and second-best results are highlighted in bold and underlined .
Combination
Generation
GPB
LPB
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
✗
✗
0.6182
0.4387
✓
✗
0.0287
0.1112
✓
✓
0.0261
0.1108
Table 7: Effect of GPB and LPB on SIDD validation noise generation. The best results are shown in bold .
Figure S1 : Overview of Prompt DiT (P-DiT). (a) Overall P-DiT structure. (b) P-DiT block.
Resolution
Inference Time (image / second)
NeCA-W
NAFlow
Ours
256×256
150
13
57
512×512
38
8
21
1024×1024
9
4
5
Table S1 : Inference speed comparison between NeCA-W, NAFlow, and PNG.
Conditioning
Generation
Timestep
Attention
KLD↓
AKLD↓
✗
✗
0.5661
0.4132
✓
✗
0.0287
0.1291
✓
✓
0.0261
0.1108
Table S2 : Effect of conditioning features on different components in P-DiT. The best results are shown in bold .
Combination
Reconstruction
GPB
LPB
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
✗
✗
37.58
0.9800
✓
✗
46.30
0.9982
✓
✓
46.54
0.9983
Table S3 : Effect of GPB and LPB on SIDD validation noisy image reconstruction. The best results are shown in bold .
# Blocks
KLD ↓
B=4
0.0350
B=6
0.0345
B=8
0.0261
Table S4 : KLD score depending on different number of blocks B .
Figure S2 : Overview of unpaired noise generation process.
# Samples
PolyU
Nam
SIDD Validation
SIDD+
Average
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
× 1
37.40
0.9569
37.29
0.9578
36.55
0.8887
35.72
0.8997
36.74
0.9258
× 2
37.61
0.9546
37.92
0.9580
36.95
0.8838
35.87
0.9078
37.09
0.9260
× 4
37.72
0.9542
37.94
0.9578
37.27
0.8955
36.00
0.9022
37.23
0.9274
Table S5 : Quantitative results on denoising generalization performance depending on the size of the synthesized dataset using PNG. The multiplication sign ( × ) indicates the scaling applied to the original number of patches. The best and second-best results are denoted as bold and underline , respectively.
Methods
G4
GP
IP
N6
S6
Average
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
KLD ↓
AKLD ↓
NeCA-W †
0.0513
0.1765
0.0487
0.1819
0.0258
0.1609
0.0603
0.1496
0.0581
0.2205
0.0489
0.1779
NAFlow †
0.4482
1.6918
0.2260
1.0135
0.3267
1.1612
0.2200
0.8725
0.1462
0.5456
0.2734
1.0569
Ours †
0.0350
0.1567
0.0312
0.1553
0.0222
0.1392
0.0291
0.1229
0.0204
0.1326
0.0276
0.1413
Table S6 : Quantitative results for the noise generation performance on SIDD validation set under unpaired settings. The results are reported using KLD ↓ and AKLD ↓ , with the best and second-best results highlighted in bold and underline , respectively. † indicates that the model is evaluated under an unpaired setting.
Methods
PolyU
Nam
SIDD Validation
SIDD+
Average
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
NeCA-W †
37.39
0.9555
37.13
0.9495
32.86
0.7490
33.92
0.8342
35.33
0.8720
NAFlow †
32.40
0.9157
31.73
0.9381
30.89
0.7776
31.60
0.7953
31.66
0.8567
Ours †
38.00
0.9618
38.37
0.9633
32.93
0.7803
34.25
0.8557
35.89
0.8903
Table S7 : Quantitative results on denoising generalization performance trained with synthetic noisy-clean pairs generated in an unpaired manner. The best and second-best results are denoted as bold and underline , respectively. † indicates that noise is generated under an unpaired setting.
Figure S3 : Visualization of synthetic noisy images on the SIDD validation set. From left to right: C2N, NeCA-W, NAFlow, Ours (PNG), and real noisy images.
Figure S4 : Visual comparison on denoising results with PSNR ↑ on SIDD validation set from DnCNN trained on each method.
Real-world sRGB image denoising remains challenging due to the nonlinear characteristics of sensor noise and the difficulty of acquiring aligned clean-noisy image pairs. Supervised denoisers often overfit to limited paired datasets, while self-supervised methods still depend on sufficiently diverse noisy observations. These limitations motivate scalable noise synthesis methods that can model real-world noise without clean ground truth or camera metadata. We propose YeTI, a real-world sRGB noise generation framework that learns from only two noisy observations of the same scene. YeTI uses a Reconstruction Autoencoder to disentangle scene structure and noise characteristics, and models the latent noise distribution with a one-step Conditional Diffusion Transformer trained using consistency objectives. Given a single noisy input at inference time, YeTI generates realistic, signal-dependent noise while preserving the underlying scene content. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of YeTI across real-world benchmarks. We evaluate noise generation on SIDD and further assess generalization on SIDD+, MAI2021, and SID, covering smartphone and diverse consumer-camera sensors. Downstream denoising results on DND further show that denoisers trained with YeTI-synthesized images achieve strong real-world performance, highlighting the practical value of clean-image-free and metadata-free noise generation.
Jaekyun Ko, Byung Wan Lim, Soomin Lee +2
Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University · Mobile Experience (MX) Division, Samsung Electronics
Noise poses a widespread challenge in signal processing, particularly when it comes to denoising images. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have exhibited remarkable success in this field, they are predicated upon the belief that noise follows established distributions, which restricts their practicality when dealing with real-world noise. To overcome this limitation, several efforts have been taken to collect noisy image datasets from the real world. Generative methods, employing techniques such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and normalizing flows (NFs), have emerged as a solution for generating realistic noisy images. Recent works model noise using camera metadata, however requiring metadata even for sampling phase. In contrast, in this work, we aim to estimate the underlying camera settings, enabling us to improve noise modeling and generate diverse noise distributions. To this end, we introduce a new NF framework that allows us to both classify noise based on camera settings and generate various noisy images. Through experimental results, our model demonstrates exceptional noise quality and leads in denoising performance on benchmark datasets.
Dongjin Kim, Donggoo Jung, Sungyong Baik +1
Dept. of Computer Science, Hanyang University · Dept. of Artificial Intelligence, Hanyang University · Dept. of Data Science, Hanyang University
Diffusion models trained on noisy datasets often reproduce high-frequency training artifacts, significantly degrading generation quality. To address this, we propose SCoRe (Spectral Cutoff Regeneration), a training-free, generation-time spectral regeneration method for clean image generation from diffusion models trained on noisy images. Leveraging the spectral bias of diffusion models, which infer high-frequency details from low-frequency cues, SCoRe suppresses corrupted high-frequency components of a generated image via a frequency cutoff and regenerates them via SDEdit. Crucially, we derive a theoretical mapping between the cutoff frequency and the SDEdit initialization timestep based on Radially Averaged Power Spectral Density (RAPSD), which prevents excessive noise injection during regeneration. Experiments on synthetic (CIFAR-10) and real-world (SIDD) noisy datasets demonstrate that SCoRe substantially outperforms post-processing and noise-robust baselines, restoring samples closer to clean image distributions without any retraining or fine-tuning.