Local Sparse Structure Denoising for Low-Light-Level Image

Sparse and redundant representations perform well in image denoising. However, sparsity-based methods fail to denoise low-light-level (LLL) images because of heavy and complex noise. They consider sparsity on image patches independently and tend to lose the texture structures. To suppress noises and maintain textures simultaneously, it is necessary to embed noise invariant features into the sparse decomposition process. We, therefore, used a local structure preserving sparse coding (LSPSc) formulation to explore the local sparse structures (both the sparsity and local structure) in image. It was found that, with the introduction of spatial local structure constraint into the general sparse coding algorithm, LSPSc could improve the robustness of sparse representation for patches in serious noise. We further used a kernel LSPSc (K-LSPSc) formulation, which extends LSPSc into the kernel space to weaken the influence of linear structure constraint in nonlinear data. Based on the robust LSPSc and K-LSPSc algorithms, we constructed a local sparse structure denoising (LSSD) model for LLL images, which was demonstrated to give high performance in the natural LLL images denoising, indicating that both the LSPSc- and K-LSPSc-based LSSD models have the stable property of noise inhibition and texture details preservation.