International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, ISSN 0973-4562 Vol. 9 No.

21, 2014
Research India Publications http://www.ripublication.com/ijaer.htm

EFFECTIVE NOISE REMOVAL IN

GRAYLEVEL IMAGE USING JOINT
BILATERAL FILTER
P.Karthikeyan

S.Vasuki

R.Boomadevi

Department of Electronics and

Communication Engineering,
Velammal College of Engineering
and Technology,
Madurai, India

Department of Electronics and

Communication Engineering,
Velammal College of Engineering
and Technology,
Madurai, India

Department of Electronics and

Communication Engineering,
Velammal College of Engineering
and Technology
Madurai, India

Abstract Natural images are mostly corrupted by Gaussian

noise. Denoising of these images is even now a challenging task in
image restoration. This paper proposes the removal of Gaussian
noise using spatial filter. The spatial filter employed in this paper
is joint bilateral filter. The Bilateral Filter is a nonlinear filter
that does spatial averaging without smoothing edges; it has
shown to be an effective image denoising technique. For
parameter estimation the Joint Bilateral Filter requires a
reference image. In the proposed scheme, noise-free image is
taken as the reference image. The performance is evaluated in
terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, Image Quality Index and
Edge Keeping Index. The experimental results are obtained and
then compared with the results of denoised image using bilateral
filter and BM3D.

Keywords: Image denoising Bilateral filter Joint

bilateral filter
I. INTRODUCTION
The aim of image denoising algorithm is to reduce
the noise with the preservation of image features as much as
possible. The images are corrupted by different types of
noises. For example, dark current noise is due to the thermally
generated electrons at sensor sites. Shot noise is due to the
quantum uncertainty in photoelectron generation; and it is
characterized by a Poisson distribution. Amplifier noise and
quantization noise occur during the conversion of the number
of electrons generated to pixel intensities.
The overall noise characteristics in an image depends
on many factors, including sensor type, pixel dimensions,
temperature, exposure time, and ISO speed. Images are often
corrupted by additive noise, which is mostly modelled as
Gaussian, during acquisition and transmission. Several
methods have been proposed to remove noise and try to
recover the true image. Bilateral Filter is a nonlinear, edgepreserving, smoothing filter [4].The intensity value at each
pixel in an image is replaced by a weighted average of

intensity values from nearby pixels. This weight is based on a

Gaussian distribution. Joint Bilateral Filter is an extension of
Bilateral Filter based on the concept of combining the
strengths of flash and no-flash images [1]. In the
multiresolution bilateral image denoising scheme, Bilateral
Filter is applied on the approximation band of wavelet
coefficients and wavelet thresholding is applied on the detail
subbands [10]. In a new hybrid image denoising scheme,
Bilateral Filter is employed as pre-filter and post-filter for
wavelet thresholding [11]. In a multiresolution multilateral
filtering, Gaussian noise is reduced based on the idea of
regional similarity [12]. A variant of Bilateral Filter,
Joint/Cross Bilateral Filter, which uses a second image to
shape the filter kernel and operate on the first image, and vice
versa was proposed in [1,8]. Both of these papers address the
problem of combining the details of images captured with and
without flash under ambient illumination.
The performance is evaluated in terms of Peak Signal
to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Image Quality Index (IQI) [2] and
Edge Keeping Index (EKI) [3].
. The rest of the paper is structured as follows:
Section II describes theoretical background, Section III
describes the proposed image denoising algorithm, Section IV
illustrates the experimental results and Section V concludes
the paper.
II. THEORITICAL BACKGROUND
A .GAUSSIAN FILTER
Gaussian filter is a linear, smoothing filter whose impulse
response is a Gaussian function and it is not edge-preserving.
[ ] =

) ( )

(1)

where
G (x) = e
(2)
Gaussian filtering is a weighted average of the intensity of
the adjacent positions with a weight decreasing with the

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spatial distance to the centre position p. This distance is

defined by G (p q) where is a parameter defining the
extension of the neighbourhood. As a result, image edges are
blurred.
B. BILATERAL FILTER
Bilateral filter overcomes gaussian filter problem by
filtering the image in both range and domain (space). Bilateral
filter is a local, nonlinear and non-iterative technique which
considers both gray level (color) similarities and geometric
closeness of the neighboring pixels. Mathematically, the
bilateral filter output at a pixel location p is calculated as
follows
[ ] = G (p q)G (|I(p) I(q)|) I(q)
(3)
where G (p q) = e

(4)

is a geometric closeness function,

| ( )

( )|

G (|I(p) I(q)|) = e
(5)
is a gray level similarity function,
W= G (p q)G (|I(p) I(q)|)
(6)
is a normalization constant,
p q is the Euclidean distance between p and q, and S is a
spatial neighborhood of p.
The two parameters s and r control the behaviour of
the bilateral filter. As range parameter r increases, the
bilateral filter gradually approaches Gaussian convolution
more closely because the range Gaussian widens and flattens,
which means that it becomes nearly constant over the intensity
interval of the image. On increasing the spatial parameter d,
the larger features get smoothened.
Let the image pixel to be replaced is g ,
and g , be the neighboring pixels of (2M + 1) (2M + 1)
window, where (i, j ) and (i + s, j + t) be the locations of g ,
andg , respectively. Each pixel is replaced by the new
value calculated using Eq. (7).

g, =

( , ).

( , ).

( , ).

( , )

(7)

((

) )/

(8)

and the range filter WR is defined in Eq. (9)

( , )=

( ,

) /

III. PROPOSED DENOISING ALGORITHM

Let {xi, j , i, j = 1, 2 . . . , N} be the N N image,
where N is some integer power of two. The image x is
degraded by independent and identically distributed (iid) zero
mean white Gaussian noise with standard deviation n during
transmission.
The image observed at the receiver end is
,

(9)

where d and r are geometric spread and photometric spread,

used to control the performance of the Bilateral Filter.
C. JOINT BILATERAL FILTER
Using digital photography, a pair of images can be
taken in low-light environments: one with flash (flash image)
to capture detail and another one without flash (no-flash

(11)

The image is recovered from noisy observation by applying

joint bilateral filter and parameter is estimated in terms of
PSNR ,EKI and IQI.
In the proposed scheme, it is assumed that the noisefree image is known, and it is used to estimate the noisy pixels
in the noisy image. The noise-free image x is used in the range
filter of Joint Bilateral Filter as shown in Eq. (12).
W (s, t) = e

where the Gaussian filter WG is defined in Eq. (8)

( , )=

image) to capture ambient illumination. Flash images are

noise-free and have a higher signal to noise ratio. Therefore, it
can resolve in detail that would be hidden in the noise in an
ambient (no-flash) image. The flash image is assumed as a
good local estimator of high-frequency content in the ambient
image. Based on this concept, the Joint Bilateral Filter is
designed to reduce the noise in the no-flash image using the
relatively noise-free flash image. It is designed by modifying
the basic Bilateral Filter. The main problem of traditional
Bilateral Filter in image denoising is that the range filter WR
could not be accurately designed based on noisy image
[5].Since the flash image contains a much better estimate of
the true high-frequency information than the ambient image,
the range filter is designed using the flash image. The intensity
distance of range filter is calculated using the flash image.
The range filter in Joint Bilateral Filter is defined as
( ,
) /
,
( , )=
(10)
where f is the flash image [1].
The Gaussian filter is designed as in the case of
Bilateral Filter. The output of the Joint Bilateral Filter is
defined in Eq. (1) with the value of WR(s, t) obtained from Eq.
(4).

( ,

) /

(12)

The major problem with Bilateral Filter is the

selection of the parameters photometric spread r and
geometric spread d . The problem is analyzed in [6]. They
confirmed the values of d = 1.8 and r = 2 n, to give better
performance in terms of PSNR. Hence, the experiments with
Bilateral Filter are carried out using these values. The work
done by Yu et al. [8] concluded that the value of
=3+
in the design of Joint Bilateral Filter to get better
performance in terms of PSNR. Thus, in this proposed image
denoising scheme, the Joint Bilateral Filter is designed with
the same r value.The performance of this image denoising
scheme is evaluated using PSNR, IQI and EKI.

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TABLE I PSNR Comparison of various denoising methods versus proposed method for different standard deviations
Test images with
pixel size

BM3D

peppers
512x512

House
512x512

Cameraman
512x512

Existing method
BILATERAL
49.78

10

32.15

20
30
40
50

28.78
26.77
26.88
25.70

48.21
47.87
47.59
47.14

56.93
54.84
53.3
52.70

10
20
30
40
50
10
20
30
40
50

29.49
26.13
23.77
22.67
21.89
28.6
25.91
23.78
21.45
21.54

34.52
34
33.50
31.34
30.56
28.38
28.01
27.27
26.25
25.10

54.15
53.36
53.00
52.89
52.56
51.99
51.34
50.89
50.12
49.56

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Experiments are carried out on various standard
grayscale images of size 512 512 which are corrupted by a
simulated Gaussian white noise with zero mean and five
different standard deviations n
[10, 20, 30, 40,
50].Denoising process have been performed on these images
using Joint bilateral filter and the PSNR, EKI,IQI results are
calculated. Figure 1 shows the result of image obtained by
applying JBF.The experimental results are then compared with
results of denoising image using bilateral filter and
BM3D[9].figure2 shows the result obtained using different
filters.
Peak signal-to-noise ratio, often abbreviated PSNR
This ratio is often used as a quality measurement between the
original and a compressed image. The higher the PSNR, better
the quality of the compressed or reconstructed image.
The Mean Square Error (MSE) and the Peak Signal to Noise
Ratio (PSNR) are the two error metrics used to compare image
compression quality. The MSE represents the cumulative
squared error between the compressed and the original image,
whereas PSNR represents a measure of the peak error. The
lower the value of MSE, the lower the error. The PSNR (dB)
is defined as
PSNR(dB) = 10log

(13)

x, x,

Edge Keeping Index is abbreviated as EKI.The edges

are recognised to be most informative in this particular
application. The motive behind using this criterion is to
evaluate and establish how well the edges are maintained
during the denoising process. EKI is calculated using Eq. (15)

(14)

Table I gives the PSNR Comparison of various denoising

methods versus proposed method for different standard
deviations.

( ,

)
( ,

(15)
)

where , and , are the high pass filtered noisefree image and denoised image. and are the mean
values of high pass filtered noise-free image and denoised
image [3]. High pass filtered versions of the images are
obtained with the Laplacian operator. EKI is based on the
correlation between the coefficients. Thus, EKI value is close
to unity, if the denoised image is similar to the noise-free
image.TableII gives the EKI Comparison of various denoising
methods versus proposed method for different standard
deviations.
Any image distortion can be modeled as IQI in terms
of three parameters such as loss of correlation, luminance
distortion and contrast distortion [2]. IQI is calculated as given
by
IQI =

where Mean Squared Error (MSE) is defined as

MSE =

Proposed method
JBF
57.08

(16)

Table III gives the IQI Comparison of various denoising

methods versus proposed method for different standard
deviations.
Among these methods, JBF gives the nice denoising
result in terms of PSNR, IQI and EKI, since it incorporates
noise-free image to implement range filter.Figure3 shows the
graph that represent comparison of filters in terms of
PSNR,EKI,IQI.

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International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, ISSN 0973-4562 Vol. 9 No. 21, 2014
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TABLE II EKI Comparison of various denoising methods versus proposed method for different standard deviations
Test images with
pixel size

Peppers512x512

house512x512

cameraman512x512

Existing method

Proposed method

BM3D

BILATERAL

JBF

10

0.7124

0.7867

0.9765

20

0.6954

0.6777

0.8675

30

0.6754

0.4688

0.8376

40

0.6166

0.3898

0.7994

50

0.567

0.3743

0.7687

10

0.7444

0.7333

0.9223

20

0.6890

0.6315

0.9002

30

0.6100

0.5256

0.8945

40

0.5679

0.3163

0.7795

50

0.5466

0.2098

0.6567

10

0.5789

0.5654

0.8456

20

0.4432

0.4390

0.8400

30

0.4100

0.3789

0.8190

40

0.3678

0.2654

0.7877

50

0.2345

0.2234

0.6455

TABLE III IQI Comparison of various denoising methods versus proposed method for different standard deviations
test images with
pixel size

Peppers512x512

house512x512

cameraman512x512

Existing method
BILATERAL
0.7785
0.7234
0.6282
0.6154

Proposed method
JBF
0.8426
0.8356
0.8134
0.7873

10
20
30
40

BM3D
0.6543
0.6533
0.6234
0.5983

50
10

0.5654
0.6754

0.5982
0.7543

0.7567
0.8345

20
30

0.6543
0.5839

0.7324
0.7212

0.8245
0.7654

40
50

0.5641
0.5423

0.6548
0.6432

0.7456
0.7444

10

0.6123

0.7122

0.7653

20
30

0.5932
0.5643

0.7006
0.6542

0.7456
0.7339

40

0.5456

0.6265

0.6543

50

0.4567

0.6223

0.6765

Figure1: Result of Joint Bilateral

Filter on candlelit setting of
the wine cave image.
(a) Flash image
(b) No Flash image
(c) Output

(a)

(b)
(a)

(c)
(b)(c)

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International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, ISSN 0973-4562 Vol. 9 No. 21, 2014
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Figure 2: Denoised results of peppers

images.
(a) original image, (b) noisy
image(=50),(c) BMD3, (d) Bilateral
filter , (e) Joint Bilateral filter

(a)

(b)

(d)

(c)

(e)

60
50
40
30
20
10
0

BM3D
BILATERAL
JBF
10

20

30

40

50

sigma (n)
(a)

COMPARISON OF EKI

1.5

EKI

PSNR

COMPARISON OF PSNR

1
BM3D
0.5

BILATERAL
JBF

0
10

20

30 (n)
sigma
(b)

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50

International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, ISSN 0973-4562 Vol. 9 No. 21, 2014
Research India Publications http://www.ripublication.com/ijaer.htm

COMPARISON OF IQI
1

IQI

0.8
0.6
0.4

BM3D

0.2

BILATERAL
JBF

0
10

20

30

40

50

sigma (n)
(c)
Figure 3: Comparison of BM3D, BF and JBF in terms of (a) PSNR, (b) EQI, (c) IQI
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, joint bilateral filter is proposed for denoising
an image. This method exploits the edge-reserving property of
JBF. The proposed method gives outperformed results than
BM3D and bilateral filter in terms of PSNR,EKI and IQI.The
proposed framework will inspire further research towards
understanding and eliminating noise in real images and help
better understanding of the joint bilateral filter. Further, the
work can be extended by combing JBF with non subsampled
contourlet transform.
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