Weighted structure tensor total variation for image denoising

Abstract

For image denoising problems, the structure tensor total variation (STV)-based models show good performances when compared with other competing regularization approaches. However, the STV regularizer does not couple the local information of the image and may not maintain the image details. Therefore, we employ the anisotropic weighted matrix introduced in the anisotropic total variation (ATV) model to improve the STV model. By applying the weighted matrix to the discrete gradient of the patch-based Jacobian operator in STV, our proposed weighted STV (WSTV) model can effectively capture local information from images and maintain their details during the denoising process. The optimization problem in the model is solved by a fast first-order gradient projection algorithm with a complexity result of $O(1 / i^2)$. For images with different Gaussian noise levels, the experimental results demonstrate that the WSTV model can effectively improve the quality of restored images compared to other TV and STV-based models.