Department of Image Processing

Image denoising is a crucial step to increase image quality and to improve the performance of all the tasks needed for quantitative imaging analysis. The nonlocal (NL) means filter is a very successful technique for denoising textured images. The Zernike moments in small local windows of each pixel in the image are computed to obtain the local structure information for each patch, and then the similarities according to this information are computed instead of pixel intensity. For the rotation invariant of the Zernike moments, we can get much more pixels or patches with higher similarity measure and make the similarity of patches translation-invariant and rotation-invariant. The comparative experimental results show that the improved NL-means filter achieves better denoising performance.