Nonlinear anisotropic diffusion methods for image denoising problems: Challenges and future research opportunities

Abstract

Nonlinear anisotropic diffusion has attracted a great deal of attention for its ability to simultaneously remove noise and preserve semantic image features. This ability favors several image processing and computer vision applications, including noise removal in medical and scientific images that contain critical features (textures, edges, and contours). Despite their promising performance, methods based on nonlinear anisotropic diffusion suffer from practical limitations that have been lightly discussed in the literature. Our work surfaces these limitations as an attempt to create future research opportunities. In addition, we have proposed a diffusion-driven method that generates superior results compared with classical methods, including the popular Perona–Malik formulation. The proposed method embeds a kernel that properly guides the diffusion process across image regions. Experimental results show that our kernel encourages effective noise removal and ensures preservation of significant image features. We have provided potential research problems to further expand the current results.

Keywords

• Anisotropic diffusion
• Image processing
• Inverse problem
• Noise estimation
• Restoration method