Parameter-Free Fast Pixelwise Non-Local Means Denoising

This article proposes a fast and open-source implementation of the well-known Non-Local Means (NLM) denoising algorithm, in its original pixelwise formulation. The fast implementation is based on the computation of patch distances using sums of lines that are invariant under a patch shift. The optimal parameters of NLM (in the average peak signal to noise ratio - PSNR - sense) are computed from an image database, thereby leading to a parameter-free NLM implementation. Comparison is performed with the parameter-free blockwise NLM implementation already proposed in IPOL journal by Buades, Coll and Morel. As expected the blockwise implementation offers better PSNR, at least when the noise standard deviation is large enough, but there is no significant difference in quality when performing visual inspection. The highlight is that the proposed parameter -free pixelwise NLM implementation is faster than the patchwise one by a factor of 6 to 49.