轻量模型在手机NPU上实现高保真去噪,兼顾速度与质量。
Real Image Denoising with Knowledge Distillation for High-Performance Mobile NPUs

- 用大模型指导小模型,专为手机芯片内存结构设计轻量网络。
- 在2432x3200分辨率下达37.66 dB PSNR,推理仅需34毫秒。
- 适合追求低延迟、高精度的移动端图像修复应用。
尽管基于深度学习的图像复原已达到前所未有的保真度,但在移动神经处理单元(NPUs)上的部署仍受限于算子不兼容和内存访问开销。本文提出一种面向NPU的软硬件协同设计方法,用于移动设备上的真实图像去噪。通过使用高容量教师模型监督一个专为现代移动SoC的分块内存架构设计的轻量学生网络,优先采用NPU原生操作——标准3×3卷积、ReLU激活和最近邻上采样,并结合渐进式上下文扩展策略(最大支持1024×1024输入),在Mobile AI 2026挑战赛中,全分辨率(2432×3200)下验证集取得37.66 dB PSNR / 0.9278 SSIM,测试集达37.58 dB PSNR / 0.9098 SSIM。依据官方规则,在标准全高清(1088×1920)协议下,推理时间分别为联发科天玑9500的34.0毫秒和高通骁龙8 Elite NPU的46.1毫秒。进一步发现‘推理倒置’效应:严格遵循NPU兼容操作可使专用NPU执行速度比集成移动GPU快达3.88倍。196万参数的学生模型通过高α知识蒸馏(α=0.9)恢复了教师模型99.8%的还原质量,参数量减少21.2倍,且PSNR差距缩小至仅0.05 dB(原差1.63 dB)。这些结果确立了硬件感知蒸馏在统一高保真去噪与跨平台实用部署中的有效性。所提轻量学生模型LiteDenoiseNet及其训练数据已发布于NN Dataset,地址:https://github.com/ABrain-One/NN-Dataset。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While deep-learning-based image restoration has achieved unprecedented fidelity, deployment on mobile Neural Processing Units (NPUs) remains bottlenecked by operator incompatibility and memory-access overhead. We propose an NPU-aware hardware-algorithm co-design approach for real-world image denoising on mobile NPUs. Our approach employs a high-capacity teacher to supervise a lightweight student network specifically designed to leverage the tiled-memory architectures of modern mobile SoCs. By prioritizing NPU-native primitives -- standard 3x3 convolutions, ReLU activations, and nearest-neighbor upsampling -- and employing a progressive context expansion strategy (up to 1024x1024 crops), the model achieves 37.66 dB PSNR / 0.9278 SSIM on the validation benchmark and 37.58 dB PSNR / 0.9098 SSIM on the held-out test benchmark at full resolution (2432x3200) in the Mobile AI 2026 challenge. Following the official challenge rules, the inference runtime is measured under a standardized Full HD (1088x1920) protocol, where it runs in 34.0 ms on the MediaTek Dimensity 9500 and 46.1 ms on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite NPU. We further reveal an "Inference Inversion" effect, where strict adherence to NPU-compatible operations enables dedicated NPU execution up to 3.88x faster than the integrated mobile GPU. The 1.96M-parameter student recovers 99.8% of the teacher's restoration quality via high-alpha knowledge distillation (alpha = 0.9), achieving a 21.2x parameter reduction while closing the PSNR gap from 1.63 dB to only 0.05 dB. These results establish hardware-aware distillation as an effective strategy for unifying high-fidelity denoising with practical deployment across diverse mobile NPU architectures. The proposed lightweight student model (LiteDenoiseNet) and its training statistics are provided in the NN Dataset, available at https://github.com/ABrain-One/NN-Dataset.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。