  In this paper, we address the problem of recovering images degraded by
Poisson noise, where the image is known to belong to a specific class. In the
proposed method, a dataset of clean patches from images of the class of
interest is clustered using multivariate Gaussian distributions. In order to
recover the noisy image, each noisy patch is assigned to one of these
distributions, and the corresponding minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimate
is obtained. We propose to use a self-normalized importance sampling approach,
which is a method of the Monte-Carlo family, for the both determining the most
likely distribution and approximating the MMSE estimate of the clean patch.
Experimental results shows that our proposed method outperforms other methods
for Poisson denoising at a low SNR regime.
