A nonlinear entropic variational model for image filtering

We propose an information-theoretic variational filter for image denoising. It is a result of minimizing a functional subject to some noise constraints, and takes a hybrid form of a negentropy variational integral for small gradient magnitudes and a total variational integral for large gradient magnitudes. The core idea behind this approach is to use geometric insight in helping to construct regularizing functionals and avoiding a subjective choice of a prior in maximum a posteriori estimation. Illustrative experimental results demonstrate a much improved performance of the approach in the presence of Gaussian and heavy-tailed noise.