A spatially cohesive superpixel model for image noise level estimation

Blind Additive Gaussian White Noise Level Estimation from a Single Image by Employing Chi-Square Distribution

The additive Gaussian white noise (AGWN) level in real-life images is usually unknown, for which the empirical setting will make the denoising methods over-smooth fine structures or remove noise incompletely. The previous noise level estimation methods are easily lost in accurately estimating them from images with complicated structures. To cope with this issue, we propose a novel noise level estimation scheme based on Chi-square distribution, including the following key points: First, a degraded image is divided into many image patches through a sliding window. Then, flat patches are selected by using a patch selection strategy on the gradient maps of those image patches. Next, the initial noise level is calculated by employing Chi-square distribution on the selected flat patches. Finally, the stable noise level is optimized by an iterative strategy. Quantitative, with association, to qualitative results of experiments on synthetic real-life images validate that the proposed noise level estimation method is effective and even superior to the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on noise removal using BM3D further illustrate that the proposed noise level estimation method is more beneficial for achieving favorable denoising performance with detail preservation.

Gaussian noise level estimation for color image denoising

Noise level is an important parameter in many visual applications, especially in image denoising. How to accurately estimate the noise level from a noisy image is a challenging problem. However, for color image denoising, it is not that the more accurate the noise level is, the better the denoising performance is, but that the noise level higher than the true noise can achieve a better denoising result. For better denoising, we propose a statistical iterative method based on low-rank image patches. We select the low-rank patches in the image and calculate the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of these patches. Unlike the existing methods that take the smallest eigenvalue as the estimated noise level, the proposed method analyzes the relationship between the median value and the mean value of the eigenvalue according to the statistical property and selects an appropriate number of eigenvalues to average as the estimated noise level. Extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating that our estimated noise level reaches the highest value of all comparison methods. And the denoising results on color images of our method outperform all the state-of-the-art methods and the true noise level.

Robust Gaussian Noise Detection and Removal in Color Images using Modified Fuzzy Set Filter

In the data collection phase, the digital images are captured using sensors that often contaminated by noise (undesired random signal). In digital image processing task, enhancing the image quality and reducing the noise is a central process. Image denoising effectively preserves the image edges to a higher extend in the flat regions. Several adaptive filters (median filter, Gaussian filter, fuzzy filter, etc.) have been utilized to improve the smoothness of digital image, but these filters failed to preserve the image edges while removing noise. In this paper, a modified fuzzy set filter has been proposed to eliminate noise for restoring the digital image. Usually in fuzzy set filter, sixteen fuzzy rules are generated to find the noisy pixels in the digital image. In modified fuzzy set filter, a set of twenty-four fuzzy rules are generated with additional four pixel locations for determining the noisy pixels in the digital image. The additional eight fuzzy rules ease the process of finding the image pixels,whether it required averaging or not. In this scenario, the input digital images were collected from the underwater photography fish dataset. The efficiency of the modified fuzzy set filter was evaluated by varying degrees of Gaussian noise (0.01, 0.03, and 0.1 levels of Gaussian noise). For performance evaluation, Structural Similarity (SSIM), Mean Structural Similarity (MSSIM), Mean Square Error (MSE), Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE), Universal Image Quality Index (UIQI), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) were used. The experimental results showed that the modified fuzzy set filter improved PSNR value up to 2-3 dB, MSSIM up to 0.12-0.03, and NMSE value up to 0.38-0.1 compared to the traditional filtering techniques.

Noise Estimation for Image Sensor Based on Local Entropy and Median Absolute Deviation

Noise estimation for image sensor is a key technique in many image pre-processing applications such as blind de-noising. The existing noise estimation methods for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Poisson-Gaussian noise (PGN) may underestimate or overestimate the noise level in the situation of a heavy textured scene image. To cope with this problem, a novel homogenous block-based noise estimation method is proposed to calculate these noises in this paper. Initially, the noisy image is transformed into the map of local gray statistic entropy (LGSE), and the weakly textured image blocks can be selected with several biggest LGSE values in a descending order. Then, the Haar wavelet-based local median absolute deviation (HLMAD) is presented to compute the local variance of these selected homogenous blocks. After that, the noise parameters can be estimated accurately by applying the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to analyze the local mean and variance of selected blocks. Extensive experiments on synthesized noised images are induced and the experimental results show that the proposed method could not only more accurately estimate the noise of various scene images with different noise levels than the compared state-of-the-art methods, but also promote the performance of the blind de-noising algorithm.

Supervoxel Segmentation with Voxel-Related Gaussian Mixture Model

Extended from superpixel segmentation by adding an additional constraint on temporal consistency, supervoxel segmentation is to partition video frames into atomic segments. In this work, we propose a novel scheme for supervoxel segmentation to address the problem of new and moving objects, where the segmentation is performed on every two consecutive frames and thus each internal frame has two valid superpixel segmentations. This scheme provides coarse-grained parallel ability, and subsequent algorithms can validate their result using two segmentations that will further improve robustness. To implement this scheme, a voxel-related Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is proposed, in which each supervoxel is assumed to be distributed in a local region and represented by two Gaussian distributions that share the same color parameters to capture temporal consistency. Our algorithm has a lower complexity with respect to frame size than the traditional GMM. According to our experiments, it also outperforms the state-of-the-art in accuracy.