A new image quality metric for image auto-denoising

This paper proposes a new non-reference image quality metric that can be adopted by the state-of-the-art image/video denoising algorithms for auto-denoising. The proposed metric is extremely simple and can be implemented in four lines of Matlab code. The basic assumption employed by the proposed metric is that the noise should be independent of the original image. A direct measurement of this dependence is, however, impractical due to the relatively low accuracy of existing denoising method. The proposed metric thus aims at maximizing the structure similarity between the input noisy image and the estimated image noise around homogeneous regions and the structure similarity between the input noisy image and the denoised image around highly-structured regions, and is computed as the linear correlation coefficient of the two corresponding structure similarity maps. Numerous experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric not only outperforms the current state-of-the-art non-reference quality metric quantitatively and qualitatively, but also better maintains temporal coherence when used for video denoising.