A Correlation Based Strategy for the Acceleration of Nonlocal Means Filtering Algorithm

Abstract : Although the nonlocal means (NLM) algorithm takes a significant step forward in image filtering field, it suffers from a high computational complexity. To deal with this drawback, this paper proposes an acceleration strategy based on a correlation operation. Instead of per-pixel processing, this approach performs a simultaneous calculation of all the image pixels with the help of correlation operators. Complexity analysis and experimental results are reported and show the advantage of the proposed algorithm in terms of computation and time cost. © 2016 Junfeng Zhang et al.