3D Wavelet Subbands Mixing for Image Denoising

• Published in: International Journal of Biomedical Imaging Vol. 2008; no. 1; pp. 189 - 199
• Main Authors: Coupé, Pierrick, Hellier, Pierre, Prima, Sylvain, Kervrann, Charles, Barillot, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Hindawi Limiteds 01-01-2008; Hindawi Publishing Corporation; Hindawi Limited
• ISSN: 1687-4188; 1687-4196
• DOI: 10.1155/2008/590183

A critical issue in image restoration is the problem of noise removal while keeping the integrity of relevant image information. The method proposed in this paper is a fully automatic 3D blockwise version of the nonlocal (NL) means filter with wavelet subbands mixing. The proposed wavelet subbands mixing is based on a multiresolution approach for improving the quality of image denoising filter. Quantitative validation was carried out on synthetic datasets generated with the BrainWeb simulator. The results show that our NL-means filter with wavelet subbands mixing outperforms the classical implementation of the NL-means filter in terms of denoising quality and computation time. Comparison with wellestablished methods, such as nonlinear diffusion filter and total variation minimization, shows that the proposed NL-means filter produces better denoising results. Finally, qualitative results on real data are presented.