A Learnable Frequency Gated DCT Denoising Network

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.65455/p24ghq94

Keywords:

Image Denoising, Discrete Cosine Transform, Frequency Domain Modeling, Multi Scale Attention, Global Residual, Image Restoration

Abstract

DCT-based denoising often relies on fixed rules such as thresholding or retaining only low-frequency components, which easily blur textures or leave residual noise on natural images. To address this limitation, we develop a learnable denoising model that keeps the structure of the DCT domain while allowing the network to adaptively regulate each frequency band. With differentiable DCT/IDCT layers, the method applies trainable masks to high- and low-frequency coefficients, and a lightweight global attention block at reduced resolution provides broader contextual cues at low cost. An image-level residual path further aids reconstruction. Under a compact setup, the model improves PSNR and SSIM from 11.89 dB and 0.2915 (pure DCT) to 25.05 dB and 0.945, showing that replacing fixed heuristics with learnable frequency modulation leads to substantially better restoration quality.

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Published

2025-12-09