Nonlocal Means Image Denoising With Minimum MSE-Based Decay Parameter Adaptation

Nonlocal means (NLM), a patch-based nonlocal recovery paradigm, has attracted much attention in recent decades. The decay parameter will greatly affect restoration performance of the NLM method. However, the existing NLM methods with decay parameter adaptation cannot determine this parameter effectively. To address this problem, we have proposed the minimum mean square error (MSE) based decay parameter adaptation method for the NLM denoising. In the proposed method, the globally optimal decay parameter is determined to produce the pre-denoised image based on the derived relation between the global minimum MSE and the decay parameter. Then, the pixel-wise MSE is estimated based on the pre-denoised result and the corresponding method noise. Finally, the optimal pixel-wise decay parameter is obtained by minimizing the pixel-wise MSE to produce the estimated restored image and the boosting strategy is implemented on this image to generate the final denoised result. Extensive simulations on the standard test images and real images corrupted with Gaussian noise and speckle noise demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms some compared NLM methods in noise reduction and detail preservation and can provide better restoration performance than other state-of-the-art denoising methods in most cases in terms of objective metrics and human vision.