Pruned non-local means

In non-local means (NLM), each pixel is denoised by performing a weighted averaging of its neighbouring pixels, where the weights are computed using image patches. The authors demonstrate that the denoising performance of NLM can be improved by pruning the neighbouring pixels, namely, by rejecting neighbouring pixels whose weights are below a certain threshold $\lambda $λ. While pruning can potentially reduce pixel averaging in uniform-intensity regions, they demonstrate that there is generally an overall improvement in the denoising performance. In particular, the improvement comes from pixels situated close to edges and corners. The success of the proposed method strongly depends on the choice of the global threshold $\lambda $λ, which in turn depends on the noise level and the image characteristics. They show how Stein's unbiased estimator of the mean-squared error can be used to optimally tune $\lambda $λ, at a marginal computational overhead. They present some representative denoising results to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over NLM and its variants.