A recommender system to restore images with impulse noise

Abstract

We build a collaborative filtering recommender system to restore images with impulse noise for which the noisy pixels have been previously identified. We define this recommender system in terms of a new color image representation using three matrices that depend on the noise-free pixels of the image to restore, and two parameters: $k$, the number of features; and $\lambda$, the regularization factor. We perform experiments on a well known image database to test our algorithm and we provide image quality statistics for the results obtained. We discuss the roles of bias and variance in the performance of our algorithm as determined by the values of $k$ and $\lambda$, and provide guidance on how to choose the values of these parameters. Finally, we discuss the possibility of using our collaborative filtering recommender system to perform image inpainting and super-resolution.