Gaussian Noise Reduction Technique using Improved Kernel Function based on Non-Local Means Filter

Abstract

A Gaussian noise is caused by surrounding environment or channel interference when transmitting image. The noise reduces not only image quality degradation but also high-level image processing performance. The Non-Local Means (NLM) filter finds similarity in the neighboring sets of pixels to remove noise and assigns weights according to similarity. The weighted average is calculated based on the weight. The NLM filter method shows low noise cancellation performance and high complexity in the process of finding the similarity using weight allocation and neighbor set. In order to solve these problems, we propose an algorithm that shows an excellent noise reduction performance by using Summed Square Image (SSI) to reduce the complexity and applying the weighting function based on a cosine Gaussian kernel function. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.