Bilateral filtering with adaptation to phase coherence and noise

In this paper, a bilateral filter with adaptive domain and range parameter is introduced for image denoising. Since the objective of denoising is to reduce noise as much as possible while preserving the perceptually important details, the parameters are adjusted in accordance with perceptual significance of pixels and noise level. The domain parameter is obtained by using the maximum and minimum moments of local phase coherence for being the representative of image details such as edges and corners of an image. The range parameter is estimated from the intensity-homogeneity measurements for their ability to represent the underlying noise. In addition, the filter is applied in an iterative manner to reduce the residual noise. Experiments are carried out using various standard images, and the results show that the proposed method is more effective in reducing additive white Gaussian noise as compared to several recently introduced denoising techniques in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index and visual quality. In addition, experiments performed using real noisy images reveal the ability of the proposed filter to provide denoised images of better visual quality.