Separable bilateral nonlocal means

Nonlocal means filtering is an edge-preserving denoising method whose filter weights are determined by Gaussian weighted patch similarities. The nonlocal means filter shows superior performance in removing additive Gaussian noise at the expense of high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective denoising method by introducing a separable implementation of the nonlocal means filter and adopting a bilateral kernel for computing patch similarities. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides comparable performance to the original nonlocal means, with lower computational complexity.