CID: Combined Image Denoising in Spatial and Frequency Domains Using Web Images

In this paper, we propose a novel two-step scheme to filter heavy noise from images with the assistance of retrieved Web images. There are two key technical contributions in our scheme. First, for every noisy image block, we build two three dimensional (3D) data cubes by using similar blocks in retrieved Web images and similar nonlocal blocks within the noisy image, respectively. To better use their correlations, we propose different denoising strategies. The denoising in the 3D cube built upon the retrieved images is performed as median filtering in the spatial domain, whereas the denoising in the other 3D cube is performed in the frequency domain. These two denoising results are then combined in the frequency domain to produce a denoising image. Second, to handle heavy noise, we further propose using the denoising image to improve image registration of the retrieved Web images, 3D cube building, and the estimation of filtering parameters in the frequency domain. Afterwards, the proposed denoising is performed on the noisy image again to generate the final denoising result. Our experimental results show that when the noise is high, the proposed scheme is better than BM3D by more than 2 dB in PSNR and the visual quality improvement is clear to see.