Restoration of images with rotated shapes

Methods for image restoration which respect edges and other important features are of fundamental importance in digital image processing. In this paper, we present a novel technique for the restoration of images containing rotated (linearly transformed) rectangular shapes which avoids the round-off effects at vertices produced by known edge-preserving denoising techniques. Following an idea of Berkels et al. our approach is also based on two steps: the determination of the angles related to the rotated shapes and a subsequent restoration step which incorporates the knowledge of the angles. However, in contrast to Berkels et al., we find the smoothed rotation angles of the shapes by minimizing a simple quadratic functional without constraints which involves only first order derivatives so that we finally have to solve only a linear system of equations. Moreover, we propose to perform the restoration step either by quadratic programming or by solving an anisotropic diffusion equation. We focus on a discrete approach which approximates derivatives by finite differences. Particular attention is paid to the choice of the difference filters. We prove some relations concerning the preservation of rectangular shapes for our discrete setting. Finally, we present numerical examples for the denoising of artificial images with rotated rectangles and parallelograms and for the denoising of a real-world image.