An efficient U-shaped transformer network for low-light power image denoising

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inspection of transmission lines has been widely applied in recent years. However, in low-light weather conditions, random noise often appears in the captured transmission line images due to the combined effects of brightness, electromagnetic interference, and camera sensor limitations. This noise significantly undermines the quality and accuracy of the inspection. To address this challenge, we propose a novel transformer-based image denoising method called EUformer. First, we propose the Global Feature Compensator (GFC) module, which adaptively captures remote pixel dependencies for improved global image modelling. Second, we designed the Mixed-Gated feed-forward network (MG-FFN), to enhance the aggregation of local contextual information. Finally, the loss function is optimized by introducing a new regular term, effectively addressing negative effects such as artefacts in the reconstructed images. To assess the denoising capabilities of the EUformer model proposed in this study for transmission line images, we developed a benchmark dataset specifically for low-light transmission line image denoising. The results of extensive experiments demonstrate that the EUformer model achieves competitive performance while maintaining low complexity.