Spectral-spatial adaptive and well-balanced flow-based anisotropic diffusion for multispectral image denoising

Anisotropic diffusion can provide better compromise between noise reduction and edge preservation. In multispectral images, there exist different spatial local structures in the same band. Therefore, the levels of smoothing of anisotropic diffusion process should conform to both of image spectral and spatial features. In this paper, we present an effective denoising algorithm by integrating the spectral-spatial adaptive mechanism into a well-balanced flow (WBF) based anisotropic diffusion model, in which an adjustable weighted function is introduced to perform the appropriate levels of smoothing and enhancing according to different feature scales. Moreover, we make the fidelity term in the model to be adaptive by replacing the original noisy signal with the last evolution of the smoothed image. Consequently, the proposed algorithm can better control the diffusion behavior than traditional multispectral diffusion-based algorithms. The experimental results verify that our algorithm can improve visual quality of the image and obtain better quality indices. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.