Introducing oriented Laplacian diffusion into a variational decomposition model

The decomposition model proposed by Osher, Solé and Vese in 2003 (the OSV model) is known for its good denoising performance. This performance has been found to be due to its higher weighting of lower image frequencies in the H ^-1-norm modeling the noise component in the model. However, the OSV model tends to also move high-frequency texture into this noise component. Diffusion with an oriented Laplacian for oriented texture is introduced in this paper, in lieu of the usual Laplacian operator used to solve the OSV model, thereby significantly reducing the presence of such texture in the noise component. Results obtained from the proposed oriented Laplacian model for test images with oriented texture are given, and compared to those from the OSV model as well as the Mean Curvature model (MCM). In general, the proposed oriented Laplacian model yields higher signal-to-noise ratios and visually superior denoising results than either the OSV or the MCM models. We also compare the proposed method to a non-local means model and find that although the proposed method generally yields slightly lower signal-to-noise ratios, it generally gives results of better perceptual visual quality.