Edge-Aware Spatial Denoising Filtering Based on a Psychological Model of Stimulus Similarity

Noise reduction is a fundamental operation in image quality enhancement. In recent years, a large body of techniques at the crossroads of statistics and functional analysis have been developed to minimize the blurring artifact introduced in the denoising process. Recent studies focus on edge-aware filters due to their tendency to preserve image structures. In this study, we adopt a psychological model of similarity based on Shepard’s generalization law and introduce a new signal-dependent window selection technique. Such a focus is warranted because blurring is essentially a cognitive act related to the human perception of physical stimuli (pixels). The proposed windowing technique can be used to implement a wide range of edge-aware spatial denoising filters, thereby transforming them into nonlocal filters. We employ simulations using both synthetic and real image samples to evaluate the performance of the proposed method by quantifying the enhancement in the signal strength, noise suppression, and structural preservation measured in terms of the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), and Structural Similarity (SSIM) index, respectively. In our experiments, we observe that incorporating the proposed windowing technique in the design of mean, median, and nonlocalmeans filters substantially reduces the MSE while simultaneously increasing the PSNR and the SSIM

Recent Progress in Image Deblurring

This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image deblurring, including non-blind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, image deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods, homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also presented.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figure

Geometry-Aware Neighborhood Search for Learning Local Models for Image Reconstruction

Local learning of sparse image models has proven to be very effective to solve inverse problems in many computer vision applications. To learn such models, the data samples are often clustered using the K-means algorithm with the Euclidean distance as a dissimilarity metric. However, the Euclidean distance may not always be a good dissimilarity measure for comparing data samples lying on a manifold. In this paper, we propose two algorithms for determining a local subset of training samples from which a good local model can be computed for reconstructing a given input test sample, where we take into account the underlying geometry of the data. The first algorithm, called Adaptive Geometry-driven Nearest Neighbor search (AGNN), is an adaptive scheme which can be seen as an out-of-sample extension of the replicator graph clustering method for local model learning. The second method, called Geometry-driven Overlapping Clusters (GOC), is a less complex nonadaptive alternative for training subset selection. The proposed AGNN and GOC methods are evaluated in image super-resolution, deblurring and denoising applications and shown to outperform spectral clustering, soft clustering, and geodesic distance based subset selection in most settings.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures and 5 table

Adaptive Edge-guided Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) Image Denoising Algorithm

Image denoising is a well studied field, yet reducing noise from images is still a valid challenge. Recently proposed Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) is the current state of the art algorithm for denoising images corrupted by Additive White Gaussian noise (AWGN). Though BM3D outperforms all existing methods for AWGN denoising, still its performance decreases as the noise level increases in images, since it is harder to find proper match for reference blocks in the presence of highly corrupted pixel values. It also blurs sharp edges and textures. To overcome these problems we proposed an edge guided BM3D with selective pixel restoration. For higher noise levels it is possible to detect noisy pixels form its neighborhoods gray level statistics. We exploited this property to reduce noise as much as possible by applying a pre-filter. We also introduced an edge guided pixel restoration process in the hard-thresholding step of BM3D to restore the sharpness of edges and textures. Experimental results confirm that our proposed method is competitive and outperforms the state of the art BM3D in all considered subjective and objective quality measurements, particularly in preserving edges, textures and image contrast

A Sparsity-Based InSAR Phase Denoising Algorithm Using Nonlocal Wavelet Shrinkage

An interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) phase denoising algorithm using the local sparsity of wavelet coefficients and nonlocal similarity of grouped blocks was developed. From the Bayesian perspective, the double-l1 norm regularization model that enforces the local and nonlocal sparsity constraints was used. Taking advantages of coefficients of the nonlocal similarity between group blocks for the wavelet shrinkage, the proposed algorithm effectively filtered the phase noise. Applying the method to simulated and acquired InSAR data, we obtained satisfactory results. In comparison, the algorithm outperformed several widely-used InSAR phase denoising approaches in terms of the number of residues, root-mean-square errors and other edge preservation indexes