A Content-Aware Non-Local Means Method for Image Denoising

Abstract

Parameter setting and information redundancy are essential issues for the non-local means (NLM) algorithm. This paper introduces a new factor based on the Hessian matrix to adapt the smoothing parameter. Then, a strategy is proposed to implement the NLM by representing patches in terms of features, which uses the 2D histogram and summed-area table. Compared with other methods, the metric for patch similarity in this paper is based on statistical features of patches instead of Euclidean distance. More importantly, not many predefined thresholds are needed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm obtains better visual quality and numerical results, especially for images with rich contents and high noise.