An Adaptive Diffusion Scheme for Image Restoration and Selective Smoothing

Anisotropic partial differential equation (PDE)-based image restoration schemes employ a local edge indicator function typically based on gradients. In this paper, an alternative pixel-wise adaptive diffusion scheme is proposed. It uses a spatial function giving better edge information to the diffusion process. It avoids the over-locality problem of gradient-based schemes and preserves discontinuities coherently. The scheme satisfies scale space axioms for a multiscale diffusion scheme; and it uses a well-posed regularized total variation (TV) scheme along with Perona-Malik type functions. Median-based weight function is used to handle the impulse noise case. Numerical results show promise of such an adaptive approach on real noisy images.