Group Sparsity Residual Constraint for Image Denoising
This addresses the problem of degraded denoising performance at high noise levels for researchers and practitioners in image processing, representing an incremental improvement over existing group-based sparse representation methods.
The paper tackles image denoising by proposing a group sparsity residual constraint (GSRC) model that integrates nonlocal self-similarity priors from both noisy and pre-filtered images, converting denoising into reducing group sparsity residual, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in objective and perceptual metrics.
Group-based sparse representation has shown great potential in image denoising. However, most existing methods only consider the nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) prior of noisy input image. That is, the similar patches are collected only from degraded input, which makes the quality of image denoising largely depend on the input itself. However, such methods often suffer from a common drawback that the denoising performance may degrade quickly with increasing noise levels. In this paper we propose a new prior model, called group sparsity residual constraint (GSRC). Unlike the conventional group-based sparse representation denoising methods, two kinds of prior, namely, the NSS priors of noisy and pre-filtered images, are used in GSRC. In particular, we integrate these two NSS priors through the mechanism of sparsity residual, and thus, the task of image denoising is converted to the problem of reducing the group sparsity residual. To this end, we first obtain a good estimation of the group sparse coefficients of the original image by pre-filtering, and then the group sparse coefficients of the noisy image are used to approximate this estimation. To improve the accuracy of the nonlocal similar patch selection, an adaptive patch search scheme is designed. Furthermore, to fuse these two NSS prior better, an effective iterative shrinkage algorithm is developed to solve the proposed GSRC model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GSRC modeling outperforms many state-of-the-art denoising methods in terms of the objective and the perceptual metrics.