Adaptive Block-Based Approach to Image Noise Level Estimation in the SVD Domain

Abstract

Estimation of additive white Gaussian noise levels in images has a variety of image processing applications including image enhancement, segmentation and feature extraction. Designing an algorithm with a consistent performance across a range of noise levels and image contents is a challenging problem; without any prior information, it is difficult to differentiate the noise signal from the underlying image signal. In this paper, an adaptive block-based noise level estimation algorithm in the singular value decomposition domain is proposed. The algorithm has the ability to change the singular value tail length according to the observed noise levels. A number of different choices of block size are considered and, for each choice, a mathematical model is proposed to describe how to adjust the singular value tail length as a function of the initial noise level estimates. In comparison with a seminal fixed singular value tail length algorithm, the proposed algorithm significantly improves the noise level estimation accuracy at low noise levels at the expense of a small increase in computational time; for example, for the block size of 64 × 64 and AWGN level σ = 1 , the MSE is reduced by 65%, whilst the computational time is increased by less than 1.3%.