Title
Natural image denoising: Optimality and inherent bounds
Abstract
The goal of natural image denoising is to estimate a clean version of a given noisy image, utilizing prior knowledge on the statistics of natural images. The problem has been studied intensively with considerable progress made in recent years. However, it seems that image denoising algorithms are starting to converge and recent algorithms improve over previous ones by only fractional dB values. It is thus important to understand how much more can we still improve natural image denoising algorithms and what are the inherent limits imposed by the actual statistics of the data. The challenge in evaluating such limits is that constructing proper models of natural image statistics is a long standing and yet unsolved problem. To overcome the absence of accurate image priors, this paper takes a non parametric approach and represents the distribution of natural images using a huge set of 10^10 patches. We then derive a simple statistical measure which provides a lower bound on the optimal Bayesian minimum mean square error (MMSE). This imposes a limit on the best possible results of denoising algorithms which utilize a fixed support around a denoised pixel and a generic natural image prior. Our findings suggest that for small windows, state of the art denoising algorithms are approaching optimality and cannot be further improved beyond ~ 0.1dB values.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/CVPR.2011.5995309
CVPR
Keywords
Field
DocType
Bayes methods,image denoising,least mean squares methods,MMSE,generic natural image,natural image denoising algorithms,optimal Bayesian minimum mean square error,pixel denoising
Noise reduction,Pattern recognition,Upper and lower bounds,Computer science,Non-local means,Minimum mean square error,Nonparametric statistics,Pixel,Artificial intelligence,Prior probability,Bayesian probability
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2011
1
1063-6919
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
88
3.47
17
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anat Levin13578212.90
B. Nadler21227.40