Stochastic image denoising based on Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling

A novel stochastic approach based on Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling is investigated for the purpose of image denoising. The additive image denoising problem is formulated as a Bayesian least squares problem, where the goal is to estimate the denoised image given the noisy image as the measurement and an estimated posterior. The posterior is estimated using a nonparametric importance-weighted Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling approach based on an adaptive Geman-McClure objective function. By learning the posterior in a nonparametric manner, the proposed Markov-chain Monte Carlo denoising (MCMCD) approach adapts in a flexible manner to the underlying image and noise statistics. Furthermore, the computational complexity of MCMCD is relatively low when compared to other published methods with similar denoising performance. The effectiveness of the MCMCD method at image denoising was investigated using additive Gaussian noise, and was found to achieve state-of-the-art denoising performance in terms of both peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and mean structural similarity (SSIM) metrics when compared to other published methods. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.