An adaptive nonlocal means filter based on fuzzy domain for laser speckle reduction

A new speckle reduction method, i.e., an adaptive nonlocal means based on fuzzy domain (FANLM), is proposed for polarization imaging despeckling. With this method, speckle is removed by an adaptive nonlocal means in Laplacian pyramid domain. The proposed FANLM method calculates the similarity measure in the fuzzy domain, which can make the similarity measure more precise and accurate. In view of the similarity neighborhood selection problem, an adaptive selection algorithm is proposed. The performance of the proposed FANLM method has been compared with the classic methods. Experimental results show that the visual quality and evaluation indexes outperform the other methods. The researches have important reference values in removing speckle noise.