Efficient diffusion coefficient for image denoising

Abstract

Diffusion coefficient has an important role in the performance of partial differential equation (PDE) based image denoising techniques. Commonly, the classical Perona–Malik (PM) diffusion coefficient is widely used in PDE-based noise removal algorithms. In this paper, PM diffusion coefficient is analyzed regarding to its flux. Based on the analysis, PM flux for regions where the gradient magnitude is higher than smoothing threshold may lead to undesirable blurring effect and edge displacement. To address these issues, the image is divided into three segments based on the gradient magnitude: regions where the gradient is lower than the smoothing threshold, regions where the gradient is between the smoothing threshold and inflection point of flux, and regions where the gradient magnitude is higher than inflection point. We define the conditions that should be considered in these three segments. Then, a diffusion coefficient, satisfying all these conditions, is computed. Experimental results confirm the performance of the proposed method with regard to peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean structural similarity (MSSIM), universal quality index (UQI), visual information fidelity (VIF), feature similarity (FSIM), information content weighted SSIM (IW-SSIM) and visual quality.