ITERATIVE POISSON-GAUSSIAN NOISE PARAMETRIC ESTIMATION FOR BLIND IMAGE DENOISING

This paper deals with noise parameter estimation from a single im-age under Poisson-Gaussian noise statistics. The problem is formu-lated within a mixed discrete-continuous optimization framework. The proposed approach jointly estimates the signal of interest and the noise parameters. This is achieved by introducing an adjustable reg-ularization term inside an optimized criterion, together with a data fidelity error measure. The optimal solution is sought iteratively by alternating the minimization of a label field and of a noise param-eter vector. Noise parameters are updated at each iteration using an Expectation-Maximization approach. The proposed algorithm is inspired from a spatial regularization approach for vector quantiza-tion. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach on macroconfocal images. The identified noise parameters are applied to a denoising algorithm, so yielding a fully automatic denoising scheme. Index Terms — Poisson-Gaussian noise, parameter estimation, Expectation-Maximization, proximal algorithms, discrete optimiza-tion. 1