The method of wavelet thresholding for removing noise, or denoising, has been researched extensively due to its effectiveness and simplicity. Much of the literature has focused on developing the best uniform threshold or best basis selection. However, not much has been done to make the threshold values adaptive to the spatially changing statistics of images. Such adaptivity can improve the wavelet thresholding performance because it allows additional local information of the image (such as the identification of smooth or edge regions) to be incorporated into the algorithm. This work proposes a spatially adaptive wavelet thresholding method based on context modeling, a common technique used in image compression to adapt the coder to changing image characteristics. Each wavelet coefficient is modeled as a random variable of a generalized Gaussian distribution with an unknown parameter. Context modeling is used to estimate the parameter for each coefficient, which is then used to adapt the thresholding strategy. This spatially adaptive thresholding is extended to the overcomplete wavelet expansion, which yields better results than the orthogonal transform. Experimental results show that spatially adaptive wavelet thresholding yields significantly superior image quality and lower MSE than the best uniform thresholding with the original image assumed known.

A full-rank matrix A ∈ IR n×m with n < m generates an underdetermined system of linear equations Ax = b having infinitely many solutions. Suppose we seek the sparsest solution, i.e., the one with the fewest nonzero entries: can it ever be unique? If so, when? As optimization of sparsity is combinatorial in nature, are there efficient methods for finding the sparsest solution? These questions have been answered positively and constructively in recent years, exposing a wide variety of surprising phenomena; in particular, the existence of easily-verifiable conditions under which optimally-sparse solutions can be found by concrete, effective computational methods. Such theoretical results inspire a bold perspective on some important practical problems in signal and image processing. Several well-known signal and image processing problems can be cast as demanding solutions of undetermined systems of equations. Such problems have previously seemed, to many, intractable. There is considerable evidence that these problems often have sparse solutions. Hence, advances in finding sparse solutions to underdetermined systems energizes research on such signal and image processing problems – to striking effect. In this paper we review the theoretical results on sparse solutions of linear systems, empirical

Most simple nonlinear thresholding rules for wavelet-based denoising assume that the wavelet coefficients are independent. However, wavelet coefficients of natural images have significant dependencies. In this paper, we will only consider the dependencies between the coefficients and their parents in detail. For this purpose, new non-Gaussian bivariate distributions are proposed, and corresponding nonlinear threshold functions (shrinkage functions) are derived from the models using Bayesian estimation theory. The new shrinkage functions do not assume the independence of wavelet coefficients. We will show three image denoising examples in order to show the performance of these new bivariate shrinkage rules. In the second example, a simple subband-dependent data-driven image denoising system is described and compared with effective data-driven techniques in the literature, namely VisuShrink, SureShrink, BayesShrink, and hidden Markov models. In the third example, the same idea is applied to the dual-tree complex wavelet coefficients.

Abstract—Shrinkage is a well known and appealing denoising technique, introduced originally by Donoho and Johnstone in 1994. The use of shrinkage for denoising is known to be optimal for Gaussian white noise, provided that the sparsity on the signal’s representation is enforced using a unitary transform. Still, shrinkage is also practiced with nonunitary, and even redundant representations, typically leading to very satisfactory results. In this correspondence we shed some light on this behavior. The main argument in this work is that such simple shrinkage could be interpreted as the first iteration of an algorithm that solves the basis pursuit denoising (BPDN) problem. While the desired solution of BPDN is hard to obtain in general, we develop a simple iterative procedure for the BPDN minimization that amounts to stepwise shrinkage. We demonstrate how the simple shrinkage emerges as the first iteration of this novel algorithm. Furthermore, we show how shrinkage can be iterated, turning into an effective algorithm that minimizes the BPDN via simple shrinkage steps, in order to further strengthen the denoising effect. Index Terms—Basis pursuit, denoising, frame, overcomplete, redundant, sparse representation, shrinkage, thresholding.

The performance of image-denoising algorithms using wavelet transforms can be improved significantly by taking into account the statistical dependencies among wavelet coefficients as demonstrated by several algorithms presented in the literature. In two earlier papers by the authors, a simple bivariate shrinkage rule is described using a coefficient and its parent. The performance can also be improved using simple models by estimating model parameters in a local neighborhood. This letter presents a locally adaptive denoising algorithm using the bivariate shrinkage function. The algorithm is illustrated using both the orthogonal and dual tree complex wavelet transforms. Some comparisons with the best available results will be given in order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

In this paper we study the nonsubsampled contourlet transform. We address the corresponding filter design problem using the McClellan transformation. We show how zeroes can be imposed in the filters so that the iterated structure produces regular basis functions. The proposed design framework yields filters that can be implemented efficiently through a lifting factorization. We apply the constructed transform in image noise removal where the results obtained are comparable to the state-of-the art, being superior in some cases.

We study the application of Rissanen's Principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL) to the problem of wavelet denoising and compression for natural images. After making a con-nection between thresholding and model selection, we derive an MDL criterion based on a Laplacian model for noiseless wavelet coe cients. We nd that this approach leads to an adap-tive thresholding rule. While achieving mean squared error performance comparable with other popular thresholding schemes, the MDL procedure tends to keep far fewer coe cients. From this property, we demonstrate that our method is an excellent tool for simultaneous denoising and compression. We make this claim precise by analyzing MDL thresholding in two optimality frameworks; one in which we measure rate and distortion based on quantized coe cients and one in which we do not quantize, but instead record rate simply as the number of non-zero coe cients.

If a signal x is known to have a sparse representation with respect to a frame, it can be estimated from a noise-corrupted observation y by finding the best sparse approximation to y. Removing noise in this manner depends on the frame efficiently representing the signal while it inefficiently represents the noise. The mean-squared error (MSE) of this denoising scheme and the probability that the estimate has the same sparsity pattern as the original signal are analyzed. First an MSE bound that depends on a new bound on approximating a Gaussian signal as a linear combination of elements of an overcomplete dictionary is given. Further analyses are for dictionaries generated randomly according to a spherically-symmetric distribution and signals expressible with single dictionary elements. Easily-computed approximations for the probability of selecting the correct dictionary element and the MSE are given. Asymptotic expressions reveal a critical input signal-to-noise ratio for signal recovery.

The deconvolution of blurred and noisy satellite images is an ill-posed inverse problem. Donoho has proposed to deconvolve the image without regularization and to denoise the result in a wavelet basis by thresholding the transformed coefficients. We have developed a new filtering method, consisting of using a complex wavelet packet basis. Herein, the thresholding functions associated to the proposed method are automatically estimated. The estimation is performed within a Bayesian framework, by modeling the subbands using Generalized Gaussian distributions, and by applying the Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimator on each coefficient. Compared to real wavelet-packet-based algorithms, the proposed method is shift invariant, provides good directionality properties and remains of complexity O(N). Y=HX+NwhereHX=h?X 1.

This paper proposes an adaptive threshold estimation method for image denoising in the wavelet domain based on the generalized Guassian distribution (GGD) modeling of subband coefficients. The proposed method called NormalShrink is computationally more efficient and adaptive because the parameters required for estimating the threshold depend on subband data. The threshold is computed by / y where and y are the standard deviation of the noise and the subband data of noisy image respectively. is the scale parameter, which depends upon the subband size and number of decompositions. Experimental results on several test images are compared with various denoising techniques like Wiener Filtering [2], BayesShrink [3] and SureShrink [4]. To benchmark against the best possible performance of a threshold estimate, the comparison also include Oracleshrink. Experimental results show that the proposed threshold removes noise significantly and remains within 4% of OracleShrink and outperforms SureShrink, BayesShrink and Wiener filtering most of the time.