New Computational Techniques for a Faster Variation of BM3D Image Denoising

BM3D has been considered the standard for comparison in the image denoising literature for the last decade. Though it has been shown to be surpassed numerous times by alternative algorithms in terms of PSNR, the margins are very thin, and denoising is approaching a limiting point. The reason for the continued use of BM3D within the literature is due to its off-the-shelf ease-of-use in any application, which alternative improved denoising algorithms sometimes fail to match. This article proposes a new variation of BM3D, which maintains its ease of use but is notably faster. This development brings us closer to real-time ease-of-use application of new state-of-the-art image reconstruction algorithms such as plug-and-play priors. We refer to our variation of BM3D as G-BM3D. In terms of image quality, our algorithm attains very similar denoising performance to the original algorithm. Though our algorithm is written completely in MATLAB software, it is already between 5-20 times faster than the original algorithm, and the modifications to the algorithm are such that it is expected to be significantly faster when ported to CUDA language and with more powerful GPUs. The improved processing time is achieved by two main components. The first component is a new computational strategy that achieves faster block matching, and the second is a new global approach to the 3D wavelet filtering step that allows for significantly improved processing times on GPUs. The fast block matching strategy could also be applied to any of the vast number of nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) denoisers to improve processing times.