An a-contrario approach to quasi-periodic noise removal

Images can be affected by quasi-periodic noise. This undesirable feature manifests itself by spurious repetitive patterns covering the whole image, well localized in the Fourier domain. While notch filtering permits to get rid of this phenomenon, this however requires to first detect the resulting Fourier spikes, and, in particular, to discriminate between noise spikes and spectrum patterns caused by spatially localized textures or repetitive structures. This paper proposes a statistical a-contrario detection of noise spikes in the Fourier domain. A Matlab code is also provided.