Quaternion-based weighted nuclear norm minimization for color image denoising

Abstract

The quaternion method plays an important role in color image processing, because it represents the color image as a whole rather than as a separate color space component, thus naturally handling the coupling among color channels. The weighted nuclear norm minimization (WNNM) scheme assigns different weights to different singular values, leading to more reasonable image representation method. In this paper, we propose a novel quaternion weighted nuclear norm minimization (QWNNM) model and algorithm under the low rank sparse framework. The proposed model represents the color image as a low rank quaternion matrix, where quaternion singular value decomposition can be calculated by its equivalent complex matrix. We solve the QWNNM by adaptively assigning different singular values with different weights. Color image denoising is implemented by QWNNM based on non-local similarity priors. In this new color space, the inherent color structure can be well preserved during image reconstruction. For high noise levels, we apply a Gaussian low pass filter (LPF) to the noisy image as a preprocessing before QWNNM, which reduces the iteration numbers and improves the denoised results. The experimental results clearly show that the proposed method outperforms K-SVD, QKSVD and WNNM in terms of both quantitative criteria and visual perceptual.