Nonlocal similarity image filtering

We exploit the recurrence of structures at different locations, orientations and scales in an image to perform denoising. While previous methods based on "nonlocal filtering" identify corresponding patches only up to translations, we consider more general similarity transformations. Due to the additional computational burden, we break the problem down into two steps: First, we extract similarity invariant descriptors at each pixel location; second, we search for similar patches by matching descriptors. The descriptors used are inspired by scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), whereas the similarity search is solved via the minimization of a cost function adapted from local denoising methods. Our method compares favorably with existing denoising algorithms as tested on several datasets. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.