Fractional-order Sparse Representation for Image Denoising

Sparse representation models have been shown promising results for image denoising. However, conventional sparse representation-based models cannot obtain satisfactory estimations for sparse coefficients and the dictionary. To address this weakness, in this paper, we propose a novel fractional-order sparse representation (FSR) model. Specifically, we cluster the image patches into K groups, and calculate the singular values for each clean/noisy patch pair in the wavelet domain. Then the uniform fractional-order parameters are learned for each cluster. Then a novel fractional-order sample space is constructed using adaptive fractional-order parameters in the wavelet domain to obtain more accurate sparse coefficients and dictionary for image denoising. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art sparse representation-based models and the block-matching and 3D filtering algorithm in terms of denoising performance and the computational efficiency.