A Novel Weighted Variational Model for Image Denoising

Image denoising as a part of pre-processing in image analysis is a challenging area of research since noise removal and image detail preservation need a tradeoff. For classical denoising models, the convex total variation (TV) or some nonconvex regularizers are used to achieve the tradeoff. However, the denoising performance of classical models is still inadequate. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a new variational model for image restoration, where a weighted regularizer is designed to protect more geometric structural details of images from over-smoothing and to remove much noise simultaneously. To solve the model efficiently, a novel algorithm based on Chambolle’s dual projection method and the iteratively reweighting method is presented. Numerical results prove that the proposed denoising method can show better performance than the classical TV-based and the nonconvex regularizer-based denoising methods.