SwinDenoising: A Local and Global Feature Fusion Algorithm for Infrared Image Denoising

Infrared image denoising is a critical task in various applications, yet existing methods often struggle with preserving fine details and managing complex noise patterns, particularly under high noise levels. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel denoising method based on the Swin Transformer architecture, named SwinDenoising. This method leverages the powerful feature extraction capabilities of Swin Transformers to capture both local and global image features, thereby enhancing the denoising process. The proposed SwinDenoising method was tested on the FLIR and KAIST infrared image datasets, where it demonstrated superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, SwinDenoising achieved a PSNR improvement of up to 2.5 dB and an SSIM increase of 0.04 under high levels of Gaussian noise (50 dB), and a PSNR increase of 2.0 dB with an SSIM improvement of 0.03 under Poisson noise (λ = 100). These results highlight the method’s effectiveness in maintaining image quality while significantly reducing noise, making it a robust solution for infrared image denoising.