Motion- and detail-adaptive denoising of video

Abstract
Non-linear techniques for denoising images and video are known to be superior to linear ones. In addition video denoising using spatio-temporal information is considered to be more efficient compared with the use of just temporal information in the presence of fast motion and low noise. Earlier, we introduced a 3-D extension of the K-nearest neighbor filter and have investigated its properties. In this paper we propose a new, motion- and detail-adaptive filter, which solves some of the potential drawbacks of the non-adaptive version: motion caused artifacts and the loss of fine details and texture. We also introduce a novel noise level estimation technique for automatic tuning of the noise-level dependent parameters. The results show that the adaptive K-nearest neighbor filter outperforms the none-adaptive one, as well as some other state-of-the-art spatio-temporal filters such as the 3D alpha-trimmed mean and the state-of-the-art rational filter by Ramponi from both a PSNR and visual quality point of view.