Image Denoising using Wavelet

Thresholding Techniques
Submitted by
Yang Yang
9024553282

Introduction

Image denoising: Removing unwanted noise in order to

restore the original image.
Wavelet transform provides us with one of the methods
for image denoising.
Wavelet transform, due to its excellent localization
property, has rapidly become an indispensable signal
and image processing tool for a variety of applications,
including denoising and compression.
Wavelet denoising attempts to remove the noise present
in the signal while preserving the signal characteristics,
regardless of its frequency content.

Introduction
It

involves three steps:

linear forward wavelet transform

nonlinear thresholding step and
a linear inverse wavelet transform
Methods

Used

Universal

Thresholding
Visu Shrink
Sure Shrink
Bayes Shrink

Wavelet Thresholding

Wavelet thresholding (first proposed by Donoho) is a

signal estimation technique that exploits the capabilities
of wavelet transform for signal denoising.
It removes noise by killing coefficients that are
insignificant relative to some threshold.
Researchers have developed various techniques for
choosing denoising parameters and so far there is no
best universal threshold determination technique.
Types

Universal or Global Thresholding

Hard
Soft

SubBand Adaptive Thresholding

Hard & Soft Thresholding

The hard thresholding operator is

defined as

D(U, ) = U for all |U|>

Hard threshold is a keep or kill
procedure and is more intuitively
appealing.
The transfer function of the same is
shown here.

The soft thresholding operator is

defined as
D(U, ) = sgn(U)max(0, |U| - )

Soft thresholding shrinks

coefficients above the threshold in
absolute value.
The transfer function of the same
is shown here.

Universal or Global Thresholding

The

threshold
UNIV 2 ln N

(N being the signal length, being the noise

variance) is well known in wavelet literature as
the Universal threshold.
It is the optimal threshold in the asymptotic sense
and minimizes the cost function of the difference
between the function and the soft thresholded
version of the same in the L2 norm sense.
It is useful for obtain a starting value when
nothing is known of the signal condition.

Results with Hard & Soft Thresholds

(Universal thresholding)

VisuShrink
VisuShrink

is thresholding by applying the

Universal threshold proposed by Donoho
and Johnstone.
This threshold is given by
2 log M

where is the noise variance and M is the

number of pixels in the image.
For denoising images, VisuShrink is found
to yield an overly smoothed estimate.

Results with Visu Shrink

SURE Shrink
SUREShrink is a thresholding by applying subband adaptive
threshold.
It is based on Steins Unbiased Estimator for Risk (SURE), a
method for estimating the loss in an unbiased fashion.
Let wavelet coefficients in the jth subband be { Xi : i =1,,d }
For the soft threshold estimator

X i t ( X i )

we have

SURE (t ; X ) d 2 # i : X i t min X i , t
i 1

Select threshold tS by

t arg min SURE (t ; X )

S

Bayes Shrink
BayesShrink

is an adaptive data-driven
threshold for image denoising via wavelet
soft-thresholding.
We assume generalized Gaussian
distribution (GGD) for the wavelet
coefficients in each detail subband.
We then try to find the threshold T which
minimizes the Bayesian Risk.

Results with SURE & Bayes Shrink

Comparison based on minimum MSE