A fractional-order derivative based variational framework for image denoising

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a unified variational framework for noise removal, which uses a combination of different orders of fractional derivatives in the regularization term of the objective function. The principle of the combination is taking the order two or higher derivatives for smoothing the homogeneous regions, and a fractional order less than or equal to one to smooth the locations near the edges. We also introduce a novel edge detector to better detect edges and textures. A main advantage of this framework is the superiority in dealing with textures and repetitive structures as well as eliminating the staircase effect. To effectively solve the proposed model, we extend the first-order primal dual algorithm to minimize a functional involving fractional-order derivatives. A set of experiments demonstrates that the proposed method is able to avoid the staircase effect and preserve accurately edges and structural details of the image while removing the noise.