Denoising infrared maritime imagery using tailored dictionaries via modified K-SVD algorithm

Recent work has shown that tailored overcomplete dictionaries can provide a better image model than standard basis functions for a variety of image processing tasks. Here we propose a modified K-SVD dictionary learning algorithm designed to maintain the advantages of the original approach but with a focus on improved convergence. We then use the learned model to denoise infrared maritime imagery and compare the performance to the original K-SVD algorithm, several overcomplete "fixed" dictionaries, and a standard wavelet denoising algorithm. Results indicate the superiority of overcomplete representations and show that our tailored approach provides similar peak signal-to-noise ratios as the traditional K-SVD at roughly half the computational cost.