Simultaneous Nonlocal Self-Similarity Prior for Image Denoising

Abstract

Nonlocal image representation has achieved great success in various image processing tasks such as image denoising, image deblurring and image deblocking. Particularly, by exploiting the image nonlo-cal self-similarity (NSS) prior, many nonlocal similar patches can be searched across the whole image for a given patch, which has significantly boosted the performance of image restoration. To the best of our knowledge, most existing methods only consider the NSS prior of the input degraded image, while few methods exploit the NSS prior from external clean image corpus. However, how to utilize the NSS priors of input degraded image and external clean image corpus simultaneously is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for image denoising, which exploits simultaneous nonlocal self-similarity (SNSS) by integrating the NSS priors of both the input degraded image and external clean image corpus. Firstly, we search and group nonlocal similar patches from a clean image corpus, and a group-based Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) learning algorithm is developed to learn an external NSS prior. Then, an optimal group is selected from the best suitable Gaussian component for a group of the noisy image. By integrating the group of the noisy image and the corresponding group of the Gaussian component with a low-rank constraint, an iterative algorithm is developed to solve the proposed SNSS model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SNSS-based denoising method produces superior results compared with many state-of-the-art denoising methods in both objective and perceptual quality.