BM3D image denoising using heterogeneous computing platforms

Noise reduction is often performed at an early stage of the image processing path. In order to keep the processing delays small in different computing platforms, it is important that the noise reduction is performed swiftly. In this paper, the block-matching and three-dimensional filtering (BM3D) denoising algorithm is implemented on heterogeneous computing platforms using OpenCL and CUDA frameworks. To our knowledge, these implementations are the first successful open source attempts to use GPU computation for BM3D denoising. The presented GPU implementations are up to 7.5 times faster than their respective CPU implementations. At the same time, the experiments illustrate general design challenges in using massively parallel processing platforms for the calculation of complex imaging algorithms.