Non-local Mean-Shift filter for the reduction of multiplicative noise in digital images

In this paper a new method for the reduction of multiplicative noise in digital images is described. The proposed algorithm is a modification of the Mean-Shift (MS) filter which is based on the concept of the Non-Local Means (NLM) denoising. The proposed algorithm does not focus on single pixels only, as in the case of the mean-shift technique, but also on their neighborhoods. The performance of the novel approach is experimentally verified and the obtained results prove that the new design is superior both to the MS and NLM techniques.