In this paper, a new denoising algorithm to deal with the additive white Gaussian noise model is described. In the line of work of the Non-Local means approach, we propose an adaptive estimator based on the weighted average of observations taken in a neighborhood with weights depending on the similarity of local patches. The idea is to compute adaptive weights that best minimize an upper bound of the pointwise L 2 risk. In the framework of adaptive estimation, we show that the "oracle" weights are optimal if we consider triangular kernels instead of the commonly-used Gaussian kernel. Furthermore, we propose a way to automatically choose the spatially varying smoothing parameter for adaptive denoising. Under conventional minimal regularity conditions, the obtained estimator converges at the usual optimal rate. The implementation of the proposed algorithm is also straightforward and the simulations show that our algorithm improves significantly the classical NL-means and is competitive when compared to the more sophisticated NL-means filters both in terms of PSNR values and visual quality.

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Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

In this paper, we give a new algorithm to reconstruct a image from the data contaminated by the Poisson noise. Our approach is based on the weighted average of the observations in a neighborhood. But in contrast to the Non-Local means filter, instead of using weights defined by the Gaussian kernel, we use oracle weights obtained by minimizing an upper-bound on the Mean Square Error. Our theoretical results show that the weights defined by a triangular kernel are optimal and this approach makes it possible to automatically adapt the bandwidth of the kernel for every search window. To construct a computable filter the "oracle" weights are replaced by some estimates. The implementation of the proposed algorithm is straightforward. The simulations show that our approach is very competitive.

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In this paper, we establish convergence theorems for the Non-Local Means Filter in removing the additive Gaussian noise. We employ the techniques of "Oracle" estimation to determine the order of the widths of the similarity patches and search windows in the aforementioned filter. We propose a practical choice of these parameters which improve the restoration quality of the filter compared with the usual choice of parameters.

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The parameter selection is crucial to regularization based image restoration methods. Generally speaking, a spatially fixed parameter for regularization item in the whole image does not perform well for both edge and smooth areas. A larger parameter of regularization item reduces noise better in smooth areas but blurs edge regions, while a small parameter sharpens edge but causes residual noise. In this paper, an automated spatially adaptive regularization model, which combines the harmonic and TV models, is proposed for reconstruction of noisy and blurred images. In the proposed model, it detects the edges and then spatially adjusts the parameters of Tikhonov and TV regularization terms for each pixel according to the edge information. Accordingly, the edge information matrix will be also dynamically updated during the iterations. Computationally,the newly-established model is convex, which can be solved by the semi-proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (sPADMM) with a linear-rate convergence rate. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively reserves the image edges and eliminates the noise and blur at the same time. In comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms, it outperforms other methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM and visual quality.