Abstract—We propose a powerful video filtering algorithm that exploits temporal and spatial redundancy characterizing natural video sequences. The algorithm implements the paradigm of nonlocal grouping and collaborative filtering, where a higherdimensional transform-domain representation of the observations is leveraged to enforce sparsity and thus regularize the data: 3-D spatiotemporal volumes are constructed by tracking blocks along trajectories defined by the motion vectors. Mutually similar volumes are then grouped together by stacking them along an additional fourth dimension, thus producing a 4-D structure, termed group, where different types of data correlation exist along the different dimensions: local correlation along the two dimensions of the blocks, temporal correlation along the motion trajectories, and nonlocal spatial correlation (i.e. self-similarity) along the fourth dimension of the group. Collaborative filtering is then realized by transforming each group through a decorrelating 4-D separable transform and then by shrinkage and inverse transformation. In this way, the collaborative filtering provides estimates for each volume stacked in the group, which are then returned and adaptively aggregated to their original positions in the video. The proposed filtering procedure addresses several video processing applications, such as denoising, deblocking, and enhancement of both grayscale and color data. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of our method in terms of both subjective and objective visual quality, and shows that it outperforms the state of the art in video denoising. Index Terms—Video filtering, video denoising, video deblocking, video enhancement, nonlocal methods, adaptive transforms, motion estimation. I.

Abstract — The goal of this paper is to characterize the best achievable performance for the problem of estimating an unknown parameter having a sparse representation. Specifically, we consider the setting in which a sparsely representable deterministic parameter vector is to be estimated from measurements corrupted by Gaussian noise, and derive a lower bound on the mean-squared error (MSE) achievable in this setting. To this end, an appropriate definition of bias in the sparse setting is developed, and the constrained Cramér–Rao bound (CRB) is obtained. This bound is shown to equal the CRB of an estimator with knowledge of the support set, for almost all feasible parameter values. Consequently, in the unbiased case, our bound is identical to the MSE of the oracle estimator. Combined with the fact that the CRB is achieved at high signal-to-noise ratios by the maximum likelihood technique, our result provides a new interpretation for the common practice of using the oracle estimator as a gold standard against which practical approaches are compared.