Pooling-Based Context Modeling for Convolution-Free Deep Image Prior

Abstract

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve strong denoising performance by exploiting spatial context from neighboring pixels. Deep Image Prior (DIP) leverages this property to restore images from a single noisy input without requiring large datasets. However, the over-parameterized architecture of DIP often leads to noise fitting during optimization. In this paper, we propose Pool-DIP, a convolution-free architecture that incorporates pooling-based contrast modeling to capture spatial context efficiently. Pool-DIP improves denoising performance while significantly reducing the number of parameters and computational complexity compared to convolution-based DIP models. Experimental results show that Pool-DIP achieves competitive performance across multiple datasets, including a real-world benchmark. Spectral analysis further reveals that Pool-DIP stabilizes the evolution of high-frequency components during optimization and suppresses erroneous high-frequency signals. The proposed architecture also generalizes well to other image restoration tasks such as super-resolution and inpainting.