Due to the rapid development of deep learning and artificial intelligence techniques, denoising via neural networks has drawn great attention due to their flexibility and excellent performances. However, for most convolutional network denoising methods, the convolution kernel is only one layer deep, and features of distinct scales are neglected. Moreover, in the convolution operation, all channels are treated equally; the relationships of channels are not considered. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale feature extraction-based normalized attention neural network (MFENANN) for image denoising. In MFENANN, we define a multi-scale feature extraction block to extract and combine features at distinct scales of the noisy image. In addition, we propose a normalized attention network (NAN) to learn the relationships between channels, which smooths the optimization landscape and speeds up the convergence process for training an attention model. Moreover, we introduce the NAN to convolutional network denoising, in which each channel gets gain; channels can play different roles in the subsequent convolution. To testify the effectiveness of the proposed MFENANN, we used both grayscale and color image sets whose noise levels ranged from 0 to 75 to do the experiments. The experimental results show that compared with some state-of-the-art denoising methods, the restored images of MFENANN have larger peak signal-to-noise ratios (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) values and get better overall appearance.

Image super-resolution (SR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs. It plays a crucial role in applications such as medical imaging, surveillance, and remote sensing. However, due to the ill-posed nature of the task and the inherent limitations of imaging sensors, obtaining accurate HR images remains challenging. While numerous methods have been proposed, the traditional approaches suffer from oversmoothing and limited generalization; CNN-based models lack the ability to capture long-range dependencies; and Transformer-based solutions, although effective in modeling global context, are computationally intensive and prone to texture loss. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid CNN–Transformer architecture that cascades a pixel-wise self-attention non-local means module (PSNLM) and an adaptive dual-path multi-scale fusion block (ADMFB). The PSNLM is inspired by the non-local means (NLM) algorithm. We use weighted patches to estimate the similarity between pixels centered at each patch while limiting the search region and constructing a communication mechanism across ranges. The ADMFB enhances texture reconstruction by adaptively aggregating multi-scale features through dual attention paths. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on multiple benchmarks. For instance, in challenging ×4 super-resolution, our method outperforms the second-best method by 0.0201 regarding the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) on the BSD100 dataset. On the texture-rich Urban100 dataset, our method achieves a 26.56 dB Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and 0.8133 SSIM.