From patches to pixels in Non-Local methods: Weighted-average reprojection

Since their introduction in denoising, the family of non local methods, whose Non-Local Means (NL-Means) is the most famous member, has proved its ability to challenge other powerful methods such as wavelet based approaches or variational techniques. Though simple to implement and efficient in practice, the classical NL-Means suffers from ringing artifacts around edges. In this paper, we present an easy to implement and time efficient modification of the NL-means based on a better reprojection from the patches space to the original (image) pixel space. We illustrate the performance of our method on a toy example and on some classical images.