Another interesting application of autoencoders is image denoising. Image noise is defined as a random variations of brightness in an image. Image noise may originate from the sensors of digital cameras. Although digital cameras these days are capable of capturing high quality images, image noise may still occur, especially in low light conditions.
Denoising images has been a challenge for researchers for many years. Early methods include applying some sort of image filter (that is, mean averaging filter, where the pixel value is replaced with the average pixel value of its neighbors) over the image. However, such methods can sometimes fall short and the effects can be less than ideal.
A few years ago, researchers discovered that we can train autoencoders for image denoising. The idea is simple. Instead of using the same input and output when training conventional...