Collaborative Filtering-Based Method for Low-Resolution and Details Preserving Image Denoising

Abstract: Over the years, progressive improvements in denoising performance have been achieved by several image denoising algorithms that have been proposed. Despite this, many of these state-of-the-art algorithms tend to smooth out the denoised image resulting in the loss of some image details after denoising. Many also distort images of lower resolution resulting in a partial or complete structural loss. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by proposing a collaborative filtering-based (CoFiB) denoising algorithm. Our proposed algorithm performs weighted sparse domain collaborative denoising by taking advantage of the fact that similar patches tend to have similar sparse representations in the sparse domain. This gives our algorithm the intelligence to strike a balance between image detail preservation and noise removal. Our extensive experiments showed that our proposed CoFiB algorithm does not only preserve the image details but also perform excellently for images of any given resolution where many denoising algorithms tend to struggle, specifically at low resolutions.