Plug-and-play (PnP) methods offer an iterative strategy for solving image restoration (IR) problems in a zero-shot manner, using a learned discriminative denoiser as the implicit prior. More recently, a sampling-based variant of this approach, which utilizes a pre-trained generative diffusion model, has gained great popularity for solving IR problems through stochastic sampling. The IR results using PnP with a pre-trained diffusion model demonstrate distinct advantages compared to those using discriminative denoisers, i.e.,improved perceptual quality while sacrificing the data fidelity. The unsatisfactory results are due to the lack of integration of these strategies in the IR tasks. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot IR scheme, dubbed Reconciling Diffusion Model in Dual (RDMD), which leverages only a single pre-trained diffusion model to construct two complementary regularizers. Specifically, the diffusion model in RDMD will iteratively perform deterministic denoising and stochastic sampling, aiming to achieve highfidelity image restoration with appealing perceptual quality. RDMD also allows users to customize the distortion-perception tradeoff with a single hyperparameter, enhancing the adaptability of the restoration process in different practical scenarios. Extensive experiments on several IR tasks demonstrate that our proposed method could achieve superior results compared to existing approaches on both the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/chongwang1024/rdmd.

Modeling and synthesizing real noise in the standard RGB (sRGB) domain is challenging due to the complicated noise distribution. While most of the deep noise generators proposed to synthesize sRGB real noise using an end-to-end trained model, the lack of explicit noise modeling degrades the quality of their synthesized noise. In this work, we propose to model the real noise as not only dependent on the underlying clean image pixel intensity, but also highly correlated to its neighboring noise realization within the local region. Correspondingly, we propose a novel noise synthesizing framework by explicitly learning its neighboring correlation on top of the signal dependency. With the proposed noise model, our framework greatly bridges the distribution gap between synthetic noise and real noise. We show that our generated “real” sRGB noisy images can be used for training supervised deep denoisers, thus to improve their real denoising results with a large margin, comparing to the popular classic denoisers or the deep denoisers that are trained on other sRGB noise generators. The code will be available at https://github.com/xuan611/sRGB-Real-Noise-Synthesizing.