Nonlocal means is one of the well known and mostly used image denoising methods. The conventional nonlocal means approach uses weighted version of all patches in a search neighbourhood to denoise the center patch. However, this search neighbourhood can include some dissimilar patches. In this letter, we propose a pre-processing hard thresholding algorithm that eliminates those dissimilar patches. Consequently, the method improves the performance of nonlocal means. The threshold is calculated based on the distribution of distances of noisy similar patches. The method denoted by Similarity Validation Based Nonlocal Means (NLM-SVB) shows improvement in terms of PSNR and SSIM of the retrieved image in comparison with nonlocal means and some recent variations of nonlocal means.