The noise clinic: A universal blind denoising algorithm

Abstract

Most papers on denoising methods assume a white Gaussian noise model. Yet in most images handled by the public or by scientific users, the noise model is unknown and is not white, because of the various processes applied to the image before it reaches the user: scanning, demosaicing, compression, de-convolution, etc. To cope with this wide ranging problem, we propose a blind multiscale denoising algorithm working for noise which is simultaneously signal and frequency dependent. On noisy images coming from diverse sources (JPEG, scans of old photographs, ...) we show perceptually convincing results. This algorithm is compared to the state-of-the-art and it is also validated on images with white noise.