In order to decrease the sensitivity of the constant scale parameter, adaptively optimize the scale parameter in the iteration regularization model (IRM) and attain a desirable level of applicability for image denoising, a novel IRM with the adaptive scale parameter is proposed. First, the classic regularization item is modified and the equation of the adaptive scale parameter is deduced. Then, the initial value of the varying scale parameter is obtained by the trend of the number of iterations and the scale parameter sequence vectors. Finally, the novel iterative regularization method is used for image denoising. Numerical experiments show that compared with the IRM with the constant scale parameter, the proposed method with the varying scale parameter can not only reduce the number of iterations when the scale parameter becomes smaller, but also efficiently remove noise when the scale parameter becomes bigger and well preserve the details of images.