Non-Local Means Image Denoising Using Shapiro-wilk Similarity Measure

Most of the real-time image acquisitions produce noisy measurements of the unknown true images. Image denoising is the post-acquisition technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the acquired images. Denoising is an essential pre-processing step for different image processing applications such as image segmentation, feature extraction, registration, and other quantitative measurements. Among different denoising methods proposed in the literature, the non-local means method is a preferred choice for images corrupted with an additive Gaussian noise. A conventional non-local means filter (CNLM) suppresses noise in a given image with minimum loss of structural information. In this paper, we propose modifications to the CNLM algorithm where the samples are selected statistically using Shapiro-Wilk test. The experiments on standard test images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.