English

Next-Scale Prediction: A Self-Supervised Approach for Real-World Image Denoising

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-02 v2

Abstract

Self-supervised real-world image denoising remains a fundamental challenge, arising from the antagonistic trade-off between decorrelating spatially structured noise and preserving high-frequency details. Existing blind-spot network (BSN) methods rely on pixel-shuffle downsampling (PD) to decorrelate noise, but aggressive downsampling fragments fine structures, while milder downsampling fails to remove correlated noise. To address this, we introduce Next-Scale Prediction (NSP), a novel self-supervised paradigm that decouples noise decorrelation from detail preservation. NSP constructs cross-scale training pairs, where BSN takes low-resolution, fully decorrelated sub-images as input to predict high-resolution targets that retain fine details. As a by-product, NSP naturally supports super-resolution of noisy images without retraining or modification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NSP achieves state-of-the-art self-supervised denoising performance on real-world benchmarks, significantly alleviating the long-standing conflict between noise decorrelation and detail preservation. The code is available at https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/2026-CVPR-NSP.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.21038,
  title  = {Next-Scale Prediction: A Self-Supervised Approach for Real-World Image Denoising},
  author = {Yiwen Shan and Haiyu Zhao and Peng Hu and Xi Peng and Yuanbiao Gou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.21038},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:39:42.996Z