ASCNet: Asymmetric Sampling Correction Network for Infrared Image Destriping
Shuai Yuan, Hanlin Qin, Xiang Yan, Shiqi Yang, Shuowen Yang, Naveed Akhtar, Huixin Zhou
Abstract
In a real-world infrared (IR) imaging system, effectively learning a consistent stripe noise removal model is essential. Most existing destriping methods cannot precisely reconstruct images due to cross-level semantic gaps and insufficient characterization of the global column features. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel IR image destriping method, called asymmetric sampling correction network (ASCNet), that can effectively capture global column relationships and embed them into a U-shaped framework, providing comprehensive discriminative representation and seamless semantic connectivity. Our ASCNet consists of three core elements: residual Haar discrete wavelet transform (RHDWT), pixel shuffle (PS), and column nonuniformity correction module (CNCM). Specifically, RHDWT is a novel downsampler that employs double-branch modeling to effectively integrate stripe-directional prior knowledge and data-driven semantic interaction to enrich the feature representation. Observing the semantic patterns crosstalk of stripe noise, PS is introduced as an upsampler to prevent excessive a priori decoding and performing semantic-bias-free image reconstruction. After each sampling, CNCM captures the column relationships in long-range dependencies. By incorporating column, spatial, and self-dependence information, CNCM well establishes a global context to distinguish stripes from the scene’s vertical structures. Extensive experiments on synthetic data, real data, and IR small target detection (IRSTD) tasks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art single-image destriping methods both visually and quantitatively. The code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/xdFai/ASCNet</uri>.