Robust NL-Means Filter With Optimal Pixel-Wise Smoothing Parameter for Statistical Image Denoising

Most denoising methods require that some smoothing parameters be set manually to optimize their performance. Among these methods, a new filter based on nonlocal weighting (NL-means filter) has been shown to have a very attractive denoising capacity. In this paper, we propose fixing the smoothing parameter of this filter automatically. The smoothing parameter corresponds to the bandwidth h of a local constant regression. We use the C_p statistic embedded in Newton´s method to optimize h in a point-wise fashion. This statistic also has the advantage of being a reliable measure of the quality of the denoising process for each pixel. In addition, we introduce a robust regression in the NL-means filter designed to greatly reduce the blur yielded by the weighting. Finally, we show how the automatic denoising model can be extended to images degraded by multiplicative noise. Experiments conducted on images with additive and multiplicative noise demonstrate a high denoising power with a degree of detail preservation...