Noise-Transfer2Clean: denoising cryo-EM images based on noise modeling and transfer

Hongjia Li, Hui Zhang, Xiaohua Wan, Zhidong Yang, Chengmin Li, Jintao Li, Renmin Han, Ping Zhu, Fa Zhang

Abstract: Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a widely used technology for ultrastructure determination, which constructs the 3D structures of protein and macromolecular complex from a set of 2D micrographs. However, limited by the electron beam dose, the micrographs in cryo-EM generally suffer from the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which hampers the efficiency and effectiveness of downstream analysis. Especially, the noise in cryo-EM is not simple additive or multiplicative noise whose statistical characteristics are quite different from the ones in natural image, extremely shackling the performance of conventional denoising methods.