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In image denoising, the recovery of high-frequency regions, such as image edges, directly affects the quality of the denoised images. However, previous deep learning-based denoising methods fail to effectively allocate the transmission of different frequency information and have difficulty giving network attention to high-frequency regions. In this paper, we rethink the fusion of image gradients in a neural network and deeply mine the intrinsic structure of the input image to propose a novel layered input gradient network (LIGN) for image denoising. The core of our network focuses on the features of different frequencies through two networks, which contain several key elements: (a) The input noise image is layered to widen the shallow layer of the network and to promote the hierarchical learning of different types of frequencies. (b) A multiscale feature extraction (MFE) block and information shunting (IS) block are proposed to integrate and separate various frequency features. (c) A gradient network (GradiNet) is designed to extract high-frequency information by network training, and the information is adaptively added to the input of the parallel main network (MainNet) through normalization to obtain high-quality images. Furthermore, we propose a sharpening loss function to enhance the texture details of the denoised image and improve visual quality. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed method greatly enhances perceptual visual quality and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both PSNR and SSIM. The source code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/JerryYann/LIGN. • A layered input gradient network (LIGN) based on a dual U-Net for high-quality image denoising is proposed. • Layered input and sharpening loss greatly improve the perceptual quality of the denoised image. • Multi-scale feature extraction block can capture more semantic information. • LIGN achieves the SoTA performance compared with the latest methods on synthetic and real noise datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]