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Color image restoration based on nonlocal saturation-value similarity

arXiv cs.CV / 3/20/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper proposes a novel nonlocal variational framework for color image restoration using saturation-value similarity instead of traditional RGB-based patch matching.
  • It defines a saturation-value based nonlocal total variation by incorporating patch similarity in the saturation and value channels into the nonlocal gradients, enabling finer color description.
  • The models are formulated around this saturation-value similarity based nonlocal TV, with an efficient solver using the Bregmanized operator splitting method and convergence analysis.
  • Numerical experiments show improved visual quality and quantitative metrics (PSNR, SSIM, QSSIM, and S-CIELAB color error) compared with existing methods.
  • This approach demonstrates the benefit of HSV-inspired patch similarity for color image restoration and may influence future CV algorithms and applications.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and develop a novel nonlocal variational technique based on saturation-value similarity for color image restoration. In traditional nonlocal methods, image patches are extracted from red, green and blue channels of a color image directly, and the color information can not be described finely because the patch similarity is mainly based on the grayscale value of independent channel. The main aim of this paper is to propose and develop a novel nonlocal regularization method by considering the similarity of image patches in saturation-value channel of a color image. In particular, we first establish saturation-value similarity based nonlocal total variation by incorporating saturation-value similarity of color image patches into the proposed nonlocal gradients, which can describe the saturation and value similarity of two adjacent color image patches. The proposed nonlocal variational models are then formulated based on saturation-value similarity based nonlocal total variation. Moreover, we design an effective and efficient algorithm to solve the proposed optimization problem numerically by employing bregmanized operator splitting method, and we also study the convergence of the proposed algorithms. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate that the performance of the proposed models is better than that of other testing methods in terms of visual quality and some quantitative metrics including peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), quaternion structural similarity index (QSSIM) and S-CIELAB color error.