Cauchy noise removal by nonlinear diffusion equations

Abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of image restoration under Cauchy noise. The variational method, which constructs the data fidelity term involving the Cauchy distribution by MAP estimator, has been proven to be a successful approach. In this paper, a nonlinear diffusion equation is proposed to deal with it. The main ingredients of the proposed equation are a gray level based diffusivity that estimates the amplitude of the noise and a classical gradient based diffusivity that controls the anisotropic diffusion according to the image’s local structure. The proposed equation has the nondivergence form, and its properties, including the existence, uniqueness, and stability of solutions, are established by the notion of viscosity solution. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed equation over variational methods in restoring small details of images.