EPLL image restoration with a bounded asymmetrical Student’s-t mixture model

The expected patch log-likelihood (EPLL) model is a patch prior-based image restoration method which received extensive attention in image processing in recent years for its outstanding ability to preserve the detail and structure. However, due to using the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with the noise sensitivity as the local prior, the EPLL model suffers from undesired artifact and poor robustness frequently. In this paper, to restrain the generation of artifact of EPLL model, we replace the GMM with a bounded asymmetrical Student’s-t mixture model (BASMM), which is sufficiently flexible to fit different shapes of image data, such as non-Gaussian, non-symmetric, and bounded support data. Then, the anisotropic nonlocal self-similarity (ANSS) based regularization parameters are designed to improve the robustness of the proposed model. Experimental results demonstrate the competitiveness of our proposed model compared with that of state-of-the-art methods in performance both visually and quantitatively.