US Patent 10311552 De-noising images using machine learning

The present disclosure relates to using a neural network to efficiently denoise images that were generated by a ray tracer. The neural network can be trained using noisy images generated with noisy samples and corresponding denoised or high-sampled images (e.g., many random samples). An input feature to the neural network can include color from pixels of an image. Other input features to the neural network, which would not be known in normal image processing, can include shading normal, depth, albedo, and other characteristics available from a computer-generated scene. After the neural network is trained, a noisy image that the neural network has not seen before can have noise removed without needing manual intervention.