Four-Directional Total Variation With Overlapping Group Sparsity for Image Denosing

In this paper, a new model combining four-directional total variation with overlapping group sparsity is proposed, which not only suppresses the staircase effects introduced by traditional total variation, but also fully utilizes the gradient neighborhood information on each pixel of the image. In order to decrease the computation time of image denoising, the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is adopted to divide the complex optimization problem into separate subproblems that are easy to solve. At the same time, two-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and majorization-minimization (MM) are used to solve the subproblems alternatively. Then, the proposed new model is compared with other state-of-the-art models. Experiments show that the new model is robust in denoising. The new model not only excavates the gradient information of the four directions on the image to remove the noise more effectively, but also better in preserving image features, further reducing staircase artifacts.