NeXtResUNet: A neural network for industrial CT image denoising

Abstract

Image denoising is a critical issue in industrial computed tomography (CT) inspection. Most existing noise reduction algorithms are based on synthetic data, resulting in the loss of fine details, local region distortions, and other problems that arise during application in practical scenarios. As such, a fusion network, combining ConvNeXt, ResNet, and UNet is proposed in this study to address these issues. This algorithm was applied to a self-constructed industrial CT image denoising dataset, achieving a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 47.20 dB, which is 6% (44.48 dB) higher than that of the benchmark DnCnn. This also represents a 0.5% improvement over the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) SCUNet (46.94 dB). More importantly, the proposed network is superior to other existing models in terms of the overall visual effects and degree of image detail preservation. The network structure is also concise yet simple to expand. As such, it can be applied not only to image denoising, but also to CT image segmentation, super resolution, and related tasks.