We employ nematic liquid crystals as the nonlinear medium to recover noisy images via stochastic resonance, in which nonlinear coupling allows signals to grow at the expense of noise. The process is theoretically analyzed and the cross-correlation is numerically calculated. It is found that the quality of output images is affected by the input noise intensity, the applied voltage and the correlation length of noise light. Noise-hidden images can be effectively recovered by optimizing these parameters. The results suggest that nematic liquid crystals can be used for reconstruction of noisy images via stochastic resonance based on modulation instability with molecule reorientation nonlinearity.