Edge-preserving color image denoising through tensor voting

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Computer Vision and Image Understanding. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 115, 11 (2011) DOI: 10.1016/j.cviu.2011.07.005This paper presents a new method for edge-preserving color image denoising based on the tensor voting framework, a robust perceptual grouping technique used to extract salient information from noisy data. The tensor voting framework is adapted to encode color information through tensors in order to propagate them in a neighborhood by using a specific voting process. This voting process is specifically designed for edge-preserving color image denoising by taking into account perceptual color differences, region uniformity and edginess according to a set of intuitive perceptual criteria. Perceptual color differences are estimated by means of an optimized version of the CIEDE2000 formula, while uniformity and edginess are estimated by means of saliency maps obtained from the tensor voting process. Measurements of removed noise, edge preservation and undesirable introduced artifacts, additionally to visual inspection, show that the proposed method has a better performance than the state-of-the-art image denoising algorithms for images contaminated with CCD camera noise.This research has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under project DPI2007-66556-C03-03, by the Commissioner for Universities and Research of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Companies of the Catalonian Government and by the European Social Fund