Evaluation of Denoising Filters Based on Edge Locations

Abstract

This paper presents a method to evaluate denoising filters based on edge locations in their denoised images. Image quality assessment has often been performed by using structural similarity (SSIM). However, SSIM does not provide clearly the geometric accuracy of features in denoised images. Thus, in this paper, a method to localize edge locations with subpixel accuracy based on adaptive weighting of gradients is used for obtaining the subpixel locations of edges in ground truth image, noisy images, and denoised images. Then, this paper proposes a method to evaluate the geometric accuracy of edge locations based on root mean squares error (RMSE) and jaggedness with reference to ground truth locations. Jaggedness is a measure proposed in this study to measure the stability of the distribution of edge locations. Tested denoising filters are anisotropic diffusion (AF), bilateral filter, guided filter, weighted guided filter, weighted mean of patches filter, and smoothing filter (SF). SF is a simple filter that smooths images by applying a Gaussian blurring to a noisy image. Experiments were performed with a set of simulated images and natural images. The experimental results show that AF and SF recovered edge locations more accurately than the other tested filters in terms of SSIM, RMSE, and jaggedness and that SF produced better results than AF in terms of jaggedness.