A non-local algorithm for image denoising

We propose a new measure, the method noise, to evaluate and compare the performance of digital image denoising methods. We first compute and analyze this method noise for a wide class of denoising algorithms, namely the local smoothing filters. Second, we propose a new algorithm, the non local means (NL-means), based on a non local averaging of all pixels in the image. Finally, we present some experiments comparing the NL-means algorithm and the local smoothing filters.