We propose a new orthonormal wavelet thresholding algorithm for denoising color images that are assumed to be corrupted by additive Gaussian white noise of known intercolor covariance matrix. The proposed wavelet denoiser consists of a linear expansion of thresholding (LET) functions, integrating both the interscale and intercolor dependencies. The linear parameters of the combination are then solved for by minimizing Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE), which is nothing but a robust unbiased estimate of the mean squared error (MSE) between the (unknown) noise-free data and the denoised one. Thanks to the quadratic form of this MSE estimate, the parameters optimization simply amounts to solve a linear system of equations. The experimentations we made over a wide range of noise levels and for a representative set of standard color images have shown that our algorithm yields even slightly better peak signal-to-noise ratios than most state-of-the-art wavelet thresholding procedures, even when the latters are executed in an undecimated wavelet representation.

Date Published: 20 September 2007
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 6701, Wavelets XII, 67011H (20 September 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.731412

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6701:
Wavelets XII
Dimitri Van De Ville; Vivek K. Goyal; Manos Papadakis, Editor(s)