Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation of NLM and Wavelet Methods in Image Enhancement

Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of image denoising techniques, primarily focusing on Non-local Means (NLM) and Daubechies Soft Wavelet Thresholding, and their efficacy across various datasets. These methods are applied to the CURE-OR, CURE-TSD, CURE-TSR, SSID, and Set-12 datasets, followed by an evaluation using Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics PSNR, SSIM, CW-SSIM, UNIQUE, MS-UNIQUE, CSV, and SUMMER. The results indicate that NLM and Wavelet Thresholding perform optimally on Set12 and SIDD datasets, attributed to their ability to effectively handle general additive and multiplicative noise masks. However, their performance on CURE datasets is limited due to the presence of complex distortions like Dirty Lens and Codec Error, which these methods are not well-suited to address. Analysis between NLM and Wavelet Thresholding shows that while NLM generally offers superior visual quality, Wavelet Thresholding excels in specific IQA metrics, particularly SUMMER, due to its enhancement in the frequency domain as opposed to NLM's spatial domain approach.