Locally controlled regularized spatiotemporal anisotropic diffusion

In this paper, we propose a new anisotropic diffusion formulation allowing non-linear spatiotemporal filtering of image sequences. We first formulate a multidimensional spatiotemporal diffusion equation based on Barash´s iterative form, processing independently both spatial, temporal and intensity dimensions with their own diffusion functions and scale parameters. We then introduce a local regularization term designed to smooth the remaining spike noise. Experimental results processed on synthetic data and real MR images show that considering the temporal information and the regularization term improves the filtering quality. The method is also shown to be robust to noise, blur and temporal intensity evolution. Results are compared to the BM3D method with MSE and SSIM evaluation metrics.