Piecewise constant signal and image denoising using a selective averaging method with multiple neighbors

Abstract

Piecewise constant signals and images are an important kind of data. Typical examples include bar code signals, logos, cartoons, QR codes (Quick Response codes), and text images, which are widely used in both general commercial and automotive industry use. One previous work called a general selective averaging method (GSAM) was introduced to remove noise from them. It chooses homogeneous neighbors from the two closest pixels (one pixel at each side) to update the current pixel. One limitation is that it suffered from appearing sparse noisy pixels in the denoised result when the noise level is high. In this paper, we try to solve this problem by proposing a selective averaging method with multiple neighbors. To update the intensity value at each pixel, the proposed algorithm averages more homogeneous neighbors selected from a large domain, which is based on the property of the local geometry of signals and images. This greatly reduces sparse noisy pixels left in the final result by GSAM. Similarly, our method adopts the Neumann boundary condition at edges, and thus preserves edges well. In 1D case, some theoretical results are given to guarantee the convergence of our algorithm. In 2D case, except eliminating additive Gaussian noise, this algorithm can be used for restoring noisy images corrupted by speckle noise. Intensive experiments on both gray and color image denoising demonstrate that the proposed method is quite effective for piecewise constant image denoising and achieves superior performance visually and quantitatively.

Image denoising model based on improved fractional calculus mathematical equation

“…According to the relationship between noisy image f, original image u and noise n, noise is divided into additive noise and multiplicative noise. [1] Additive noise: F = u + n, indicating the additive and independent relationship between the signal of the original image and the noise signal. In the real scene, the category of additive noise is encountered most.…”