  The original contributions of this paper are twofold: a new understanding of
the influence of noise on the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian of a set of
image patches, and an algorithm to estimate a denoised set of patches from a
noisy image. The algorithm relies on the following two observations: (1) the
low-index eigenvectors of the diffusion, or graph Laplacian, operators are very
robust to random perturbations of the weights and random changes in the
connections of the patch-graph; and (2) patches extracted from smooth regions
of the image are organized along smooth low-dimensional structures in the
patch-set, and therefore can be reconstructed with few eigenvectors.
Experiments demonstrate that our denoising algorithm outperforms the denoising
gold-standards.
