Image Denoising using Gabor Filter Banks

Ashek Ahmmed
Politecnico di Milano
Piazza L. Da Vinci 32, Milano 20133, Italy.
ashek02@yahoo.com
AbstractWe introduce a method for denoising a digital image
corrupted with additive noise. A dyadic Gabor lter bank is
used to obtain localized frequency information. It decomposes
the noisy image into Gabor coefcients of different scales and
orientations. Denoising is performed in the transform domain
by thresholding the Gabor coefcients with phase preserving
threshold and non-phase preserving threshold where both ap-
proaches have been formulated as adaptive and data-driven. For
the non-phase preserving approach the BayesShrink thresholding
methods have been used. Finally using the thresholded Gabor
coefcients of each channel the denoised image has been formed.
It has been found that for smoothly varying images the modied
BayesShrink method outperforms both the BayesShrink and
the phase preserving approaches whereas for images with high
variations the phase preserving approach performs better.
I. INTRODUCTION
In image denoising the problem in hand is that given a noisy
version, h(x, y), of an image f(x, y) corrupted by an additive
noise (x, y) such that:
h(x, y) = f(x, y) + (x, y) (1)
where (x, y) are i.i.d. as N(0,
2
) and f(x, y) (x, y),
having these we want to nd an estimation

f(x, y), of my
original image f(x, y), that minimizes the mean squared
error(MSE) given by:
MSE(

f) =
1
M
2
M

x,y=1
(f(x, y)

f(x, y))
2
(2)
That means two fold objectives associated with the problem:
removal of the noise and retainment of important image
features as much as possible.
Denoising of images is typically done in the following
process:
A. The image is transformed into some domain from the
original domain where the noise energy is well separated
from the signal energy: f
G
= F
G
(f)
B. A thresholding operation is then applied to threshold the
transform coefcients: f
T
= T(f
G
, )
C. Finally applying the backward transformation onto the
thresholded coefcients an approximation of the original
noise free image is formed:

f = B
G
(f
T
)
For us F
G
and B
G
stand for forward Gabor transform and
backward Gabor transform respectively. On the other hand
T() corresponds to either phase preserving or non-phase
preserving thresholding approach.
This paper is organized as follows: rstly we explain the
Gabor lter bank. BayesShrink and modied BayesShrink are
presented in the following section. Then the phase preserving
thresholding approach is discussed in section four. In section
ve the performance of the different thresholding techniques
are compared and the paper is concluded in section six.
II. GABOR FILTER BANK
The theory behind Gabor lters has been developed by
mimicking the properties of cells of visual cortex of human
receptive elds. These cells are restricted to small regions of
space and are highly structured. They respond differently to
the stimuli with different spatial frequencies, orientations, and
directions. Therefore, these cells can be thought of localized
spatial lters that respond only to certain spatial frequency
bands, orientations, and directions where altogether they form
a tuned band pass lter bank structure. These lters are found
to have Gaussian transfer functions in the spatial frequency
domain. Thus, taking the inverse Fourier transform of this
transfer function yields the lter characteristics in the spatial
domain that closely resembles the Gabor lters. The Gabor
lter is basically a Gaussian Band pass lter having spreads
of
x
and
y
along the X and Y axes respectively [2].
A Gabor lter is obtained by modulating a sinusoid with
a Gaussian. If a signal is modulated by a Gaussian window
of a certain width and central time, the Fourier transform
of the resulting signal can give us a measure of the local
spectrum [2]. Since the width of the Gaussian is arbitrary so
denitely such a spectrum is not unique. Now this also tells
us that by varying the window positions we can generate a
set of local spectra which can provide both temporal and
frequency information.
In Gabor transform one tries to express a function f(t)
into a series of elementary functions which are the result of
translation and modulation of a generic Gaussian function.
f(t) =
m,nZ
c
m,n
g
m,n
(t)
where g
m,n
(t) is a typical Gabor function and c
m,n
(t) tells
us how much the original function f(t) does look like that
particular Gabor function. The 1D Gabor function g
m,n
(t) is
obtained by translating the mother Gabor and then modulating
2011 IEEE Symposium on Computers & Informatics
978-1-61284-691-0/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE 215
by a complex sinusoid. We now discuss about the 2D Gabor
function. But before that we would like to mention a great
fact about Gabor lter bank. The Gabor representation has
been shown to be optimal in the sense of minimizing the
joint 2D uncertainty in space and frequency (cf.[1]).
A 2D Gabor function is dened as below:
g(x, y) =
1
2
r

1
2
(
x
2

2
r
+
y
2

)
e
j2Ux
(3)
where U is the center frequency of the lter,
r
and

express
the lter width i.e. the lter mask size as a standard deviation
in terms of pixels. The Fourier transform of (3) is:
G(u, v) = e
2
2
[
2
r
(uU)
2
+
2

v
2
]
(4)
This refers to an elliptical shape whose center is offset on the
u axis by the center frequency U i.e. at (U,0) which can be
seen from Figure 1.
Fig. 1. A typical Gabor lter bank in the frequency domain [5]
.
The frequency coordinate system can then be rotated and
scaled to create an array of lters of N different orientations
and M different scales, using the substitution:
_
u
v
_ = s
m
_
cos(
n
N
) sin(
n
N
)
sin(
n
N
) cos(
n
N
)
__
` u
` v
_
with m=0,1,. . . ,M-1 ; n=0,1,. . . ,N-1 ; s > 1. s is the scale ratio
parameter. It denes both the ratio of the center frequencies
of the lter of adjacent scales and their widths.
Since the Gabor functions are not orthogonal so the more
lters we have, the more detailed as well as redundant rep-
resentation of the image we get. On the other hand, fewer
lters can not give us enough detailed representation. So
one has to go for neither too big nor too small number of
lters. To decompose the input image into spatial frequency
subbands a dyadic Gabor lter bank is designed. Six levels
of decomposition is considered in such a way that the radial
frequency bandwidth is one octave i.e. the difference between
successive center frequencies f
1
and f
2
are:
log
2
f
2
f
1
= 1
On the otherhand, if the the angular bandwidth = 45

is
selected, this will yield the four orientations 0

, 45

, 90

and 135

. So 6 4 = 24 different subbands are obtained. In

Table I each column corresponds to a specic orientation i.e.
it contains subband detail coefcients for M = 6 different
decomposition levels but of the same orientation.
TABLE I
GABOR SUBBANDS.
m=1, = 0

m=1, = 45

m=1, = 90

m=1, = 135

m=2, = 0

m=2, = 45

m=2, = 90

m=2, = 135

m=3, = 0

m=3, = 45

m=3, = 90

m=3, = 135

m=4, = 0

m=4, = 45

m=4, = 90

m=4, = 135

m=5, = 0

m=5, = 45

m=5, = 90

m=5, = 135

m=6, = 0

m=6, = 45

m=6, = 90

m=6, = 135

III. BAYES SHRINK THRESHOLDING

Thresholding is a non-linear technique, yet it is very simple
because it operates on one transform coefcient at a time.
The theoretical formulation of ltering additive i.i.d. Gaussian
noise of (zero mean and variance
2
) via thresholding wavelet
coefcients was pioneered by Donho and Johnstone. Two
basic types of thresholding are:
A. Hard thresholding: it sets a transform coefcient to 0 if
its magnitude is less than the threshold;otherwise it is kept
i.e. D(c, T) = c |c| > T.
B. Soft thresholding: it sets a transform coefcient to 0 if
its magnitude is less than the threshold;otherwise it is
shrinked in magnitude.
i.e. D(c, T) = sgn(c) max(0, |c| T)
(a) hard thresholding (b) soft thresholding
Fig. 2. Basic thresholding types.
Most well known thresholding methods include VisuShrink,
SureShrink, and BayesShrink. For image denoising VisuShrink
is known to yield overly smoothed images. This is because
its threshold choice:

2logM, known as the universal

threshold, can be very large due to its dependence on
the number of samples, M. SureShrink uses a hybrid of
the universal threshold and the SURE method, derived by
minimizing Steins unbaised risk estimator and has been
shown to perform well. The SURE threshold is data-driven,
does not depend on M explicitly, and SureShrink estimates
216
it in a subband-adaptive manner. Moreover, SureShrink has
yielded good image denoising performance and comes close
to the true minimum MSE of the optimal soft-threshold
estimator (cf. [4]). Then again it has been shown in [4] that
the BayesShrink is typically within 5% of the MSE of the
best soft-thresholding benchmark with the image assumed
known, and it outperforms the SureShrink up to 8% most of
the time or is within 1% if it is worse. Therefore, for our
work we have used the BayesShrink thresholding approach.
The BayesShrink threshold is derived in a Bayesian frame-
work, and the prior used on the transform coefcients is the
generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) widely used in image
processing applications. A GGD with the shape parameter
|0.5, 1| can adequately describe the transform coefcients
of a large set of natural images [4]. And the threshold is given
by the following equation:

T
B
(
X
) =

2

X
(5)
where
X
and
2
stand for the estimated signal standard
deviation and the estimated noise variance respectively.
To make the threshold adaptive and data-driven we estimate
the noise standard deviation for each subband using the robust
median estimator on the Gabor coefcients corresponding to
that subband [4].
=
Median(|g
m,n
(x, y)|)
0.6745
(6)
And from (1) with f(x, y) (x, y) yields:

2
h
=
2
+
2
x
we can nd
2
h
empirically for each subband using once again
the Gabor coefcients:

2
h
=
1
N
2
N

i,j=1
|g
m,n
(x, y)|
2
(7)
this is because in (1) h(x, y) is modeled as zero mean. Now
having and
h
we can estimate the signal standard deviation
as below:

x
=
_
max(
2
h

2
, 0) (8)
That means for each subband we have a (
x
, ) pair. And
using these pairs we can calculate the thresholds for each
subband from (5) and then threshold the Gabor coefcients
of the respective subbands. Just a note that if
2

2
h
then we
get
x
= 0. This in turn produces the threshold,

T
B
(
X
) =
In this case we have to take

T
B
(
X
) = max(|g
m,n
(x, y)|).
There is the problem of noise not being sufciently removed
in an image processed using BayesShrink method. But modi-
ed BayesShrink remove noise better than BayesShrink [6]. In
modied BayesShrink the threshold is given by the following
equation:

T
B
(
X
) =

2

X
(9)
where =
_
log M
2j
with M is the total number of Gabor
coefcients and j is the decomposition level present in the
subband coefcients under scrutiny.
IV. PHASE PRESERVING THRESHOLDING
Phase is very important for the human perception of images.
To be able to preserve the phase data in an image we have to
rst extract the local phase and amplitude information at each
point in the image. If we look at the expected response of the
lters to a purely Gaussian white noise then the distribution
of the magnitude of the response vectors will be a Rayleigh
distribution [7], which is:
R(x) =
x

2
g
e
x
2
2
2
g
(10)
where
2
g
is the variance of the 2D Gaussian distribution that
describes the position of the lter response vectors. From [7]
the mean and variance of (10) is:

r
=
g
_

2
(11)

2
r
=
4
2

2
g
(12)
So if
r
is known then
g
and
r
can be found and viceversa.
Knowing these parameters one can set the noise threshold at
each lter scale to be some multiple k of
r
beyond the mean
of the distribution
r
[7].
T =
r
+ k
r
(13)
We can obtain a robust estimate of
r
for the smallest scale
lter via the median of the Rayleigh distribution. The median
of a Rayleigh distribution is the value x such that

x
0
R(x) =
1
2
.
This leads to:
median =
g

2ln(
1
2
)

r
=
_

2
_
2ln(
1
2
)
median =
1
2

ln(
1
2
)
median
Having obtained an estimate of the noise amplitude distri-
bution for the smallest scale lter pair we can simply scale
this appropriately to form estimates of the noise amplitude
distributions at all the other scales [7].
217
(a) (b) (c) (d)
Fig. 3. Test images from left to right: lena, barbara, goldhill, mandrill.
V. EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
We have used the Gabor lter bank to decompose the test
images into different subbands. Each image is of the size
256256. Three different thresholding techniques namely the
BayesShrink (BS), modied BayesShrink (mBS), and phase
preserving thresholding (PhsP) are implemented to recover
the noisy test images which are corrupted with additive white
noise of different noise powers. The performance metric used
is the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). For each case of
different noise powers,
2
n
we repeat the denoising experiment
of each test image using different thresholding approaches 20
times since we are introducing random noise in the test images.
Each time we compute the PSNRs for the denoised images.
And nally we take the mean values of these PSNRs and enlist
them in the following tables.
TABLE II
PSNR(
2
n
= 0.01)
BS mBS PhsP
lena 21.97 21.98 20.49
barbara 21.23 21.46 21.40
goldhill 24.20 23.82 19.56
mandrill 18.66 18.82 20.03
TABLE III
PSNR(
2
n
= 0.05)
BS mBS PhsP
lena 21.23 21.36 20.01
barbara 20.69 20.96 20.83
goldhill 22.99 22.94 19.53
mandrill 19.00 19.13 19.65
TABLE IV
PSNR(
2
n
= 0.1)
BS mBS PhsP
lena 20.48 20.69 19.64
barbara 19.92 20.25 20.35
goldhill 21.56 21.75 19.74
mandrill 18.67 18.84 19.29
From the results it is trivial that for the test image mandrill
the phase preserving threshold is always clearly outperforming
the BayesShrink based thresholding approaches. And this
result is consistent with the increase of noise power. In
this case between the BayesShrink based thresholding ap-
proaches the modied BayesShrink gives better performance
than the BayesShrink thresholding approach. On the other
hand, for smoothly varying images the pick of the techniques
are the BayesShrink based approaches. And in these cases,
the modied BayesShrink threshold performs better than the
BayesShrink threshold in almost 80% of the cases.
VI. CONCLUSION
We analyzed the performance of phase preserving and
non-phase preserving thresholds for image denoising. The
decomposition was carried out by a dyadic Gabor lter bank.
Modied BayesShrink overwhelmingly performed better than
the BayesShrink based thresholding approach. But for the
image with high variations the phase preserving threshold gave
the best denoising performance. We plan to investigate this
fact by using more test images with sufcient variations. One
big limitations of the Gabor lter based approach is that the
maximum bandwidth cannot be greater than 1 octave. This
can be overcome with log-Gabor lters. Therefore examining
the comparative performance of these discussed thresholds
incorporated with log-Gabor lter bank demands attention.
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