Non-Local Means Denoising

Abstract

We present in this paper a new denoising method called non-local means. The method is based on a simple principle: replacing the color of a pixel with an average of the colors of similar pixels. But the most similar pixels to a given pixel have no reason to be close at all. It is therefore licit to scan a vast portion of the image in search of all the pixels that really resemble the pixel one wants to denoise. The paper presents two implementations of the method and displays some results.