In this paper

we present a new algorithm to remove Gaussian noise in images by combining region segmentation and bilateral filtering.The pixel-based bilateral filter suffers difficulties in an appropriate selection of the smoothing parameter due to the disturbance of noise

which poses obstacles to the filtering process in dealing with edges and hence degrades the preservation of image structures.Based on the segmentation of images

this work takes advantage of the region map to facilitate the filtering process.Specifically

noise characteristics within regions and similarities between regions are utilized to derive smoothing parameters corresponding to the involved pixels.By applying filtering to pixels within regions and between regions in different means

the algorithm gains enhanced adaptability to image structures.Relative to some existing bilateral filter algorithms

testing results have demonstrated that the proposed algorithm improved the de-noising performance especially on the preservation of structure information.