Multiplicative noise removal with a sparsity-aware optimization model

Jian Lu, Lixin Shen, Chen Xu, Yuesheng Xu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Restoration of images contaminated by multiplicative noise (also known as speckle noise) is a key issue in coherent image processing. Notice that images under consideration are often highly compressible in certain suitably chosen transform domains. By exploring this intrinsic feature embedded in images, this paper introduces a variational restoration model for multiplicative noise reduction that consists of a term reflecting the observed image and multiplicative noise, a quadratic term measuring the closeness of the underlying image in a transform domain to a sparse vector, and a sparse regularizer for removing multiplicative noise. Being different from popular existing models which focus on pursuing convexity, the proposed sparsity-aware model may be nonconvex depending on the conditions of the parameters of the model for achieving the optimal denoising performance. An algorithm for finding a critical point of the objective function of the model is developed based on coupled fixed-point equations expressed in terms of the proximity operator of functions that appear in the objective function. Convergence analysis of the algorithm is provided. Experimental results are shown to demonstrate that the proposed iterative algorithm is sensitive to some initializations for obtaining the best restoration results. We observe that the proposed method with SAR-BM3D filtering images as initial estimates can remarkably outperform several state-of-art methods in terms of the quality of the restored images.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)949-974
Number of pages26
JournalInverse Problems and Imaging
Volume11
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2017

Keywords

  • Image restoration
  • Multiplicative noise
  • Nonconvex
  • Proximity operator
  • Variational model

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Analysis
  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics
  • Control and Optimization

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Multiplicative noise removal with a sparsity-aware optimization model'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this