CIM-NET: A Video Denoising Deep Neural Network Model Optimized for Computing-in-Memory Architectures

Deep neural network (DNN)-based video denoising has demonstrated significant performance, but deploying state-of the-art models on edge devices remains challenging due to stringent real-time and energy efficiency requirements. Computing in-Memory (CIM) chips offer a promising solution by integrating computation within memory cells, enabling rapid matrix-vector multiplication (MVM). However, existing DNN models are often designed without considering CIM architectural constraints, thus limiting their acceleration potential during inference. To address this, we propose a hardware-algorithm co-design framework incorporating two innovations: (1) a CIM-Aware Architecture, CIM-NET, optimized for large receptive field operation and CIM's crossbar-based MVM acceleration; and (2) a pseudo convolutional operator, CIM-CONV, used within CIM-NET to integrate slide-based processing with fully connected transformations for high-quality feature extraction and reconstruction. This framework reduces the number of MVM operations, improving inference speed on CIM chips while maintaining competitive performance. Experimental results indicate that, compared to the conventional lightweight model FastDVDnet, our improved variant, CIM-NET, built upon it substantially reduces MVM operations with a slight decrease in denoising performance. With a stride value of 8, CIM-NET reduces MVM operations to 1/77th of the original, while maintaining competitive PSNR (35.03 dB vs. 35.57 dB of FastDVDnet).