Three Approaches to Improve Denoising Results that Do Not Involve Developing New Denoising Methods

Image denoising has been a topic extensively investigated over the last three decades and, as repeatedly shown in this book, denoising algorithms have become incredibly good, so much so that many researchers have started questioning the need to further pursue this line of research. In this chapter, we argue that there is indeed room for improvement of denoising results, and we propose three different avenues to explore, none of which requires the development of new denoising methods. First, we describe how it can be better to denoise a transform of the noisy image rather than denoise the noisy image directly. We mention several possible transforms, and an open problem is to find a transform that is optimal for denoising, according to a proper image quality metric. Next, we point out the importance of having a proper noise model for JPEG pictures, so that a variance stabilization transform can be developed that transforms noise in JPEG images into additive white Gaussian noise, enabling existing denoising methods to be properly applied to the JPEG case. Finally, we highlight the fact that while virtually all denoising methods are optimized and validated in terms of the PSNR or SSIM measures, these metrics are not well correlated with perceived image quality, and therefore, it could be best to optimize the parameter values of denoising methods according to subjective testing. A remaining challenge is to develop perceptually based image quality metrics that match observer preference.