Due to the fact that the fourth-order partial differential equation （PDE） for noise removal can provide a good trade-off between noise removal and edge preservation and avoid blocky effects often caused by the second-order PDE, a domain-based fourth-order PDE method for noise removal is proposed. First, the proposed method segments the image domain into two domains, a speckle domain and a non-speckle domain, based on the statistical properties of isolated speckles in the Laplacian domain. Then, depending on the domain type, different conductance coefficients in the proposed fourth-order PDE are adopted. Moreover, the frequency approach is used to determine the optimum iteration stopping time. Compared with the existing fourth-order PDEs, the proposed fourth-order PDE can remove isolated speckles and keeps the edges from being blurred. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
