2010 International Conference on Future Power and Energy Engineering

Research on Wavelet Image Threshold De-noising

Chenggang Zhen
Network Administration Center North China Electric Power University Baoding, China zhencg@163.com
AbstractThe purpose of image denoising is to restore the original image from the observed noisy image, under the conditions of meeting the minimum mean-square error criteria. In this paper,it summarized the basic principles of the wavelet threshold de-noising and various factors that affect the denoising performace in a complete de-noising algorithms, and analyzed several commonly used threshold de-noising methods and experiment with the Lena image.It provided the basis of selection and improvement for the actual image processing de-noising method. Keywords-Wavelet wavelet threshold transformation; image denoising;

Yingmei Su
College of Computer Science and Technology North China Electric Power University Baoding, China suyingmei1985@126.com the noise by means of scale transform threshold processing. The specific process of Wavelet threshold shrinkage de-noising as follows: decompose the noisy signal in each scale, to retain all the wavelet coefficients under largescale and low resolution; For each scale the wavelet coefficients under the high-resolution, you can set a threshold amplitude, below the threshold value of the wavelet coefficients set to zero, higher than the threshold value of the wavelet coefficients, or intact, or do the corresponding contraction processing.Finally, the processed wavelet coefficients obtained by the use of inverse wavelet transform to reconstruct and restore a valid signal. Commonly used model in noise de-noising problem:

I.

INTRODUCTION

It is an age-old issue of how to eliminate the image noise in image processing . For a long time, people proposed and developed different denoising methods, according to the characteristics of the image, the statistical characteristics of the noise and spectral distribution. It is a problem of how to balance to reduce the image noise and retaining details. It is inevitably for the image to be polluted by the noise in acquistion and transmission process. The traditional Fourier transform does not have the time-domain. it filters out the noise but also smooth the sharp change of the image part. At present, the wavelet image denoising method has become an important branch of de-noising and major research direction, in the past ten years, wavelet methods has aroused widespread concern in academics in signal and image de-noising the application. It mainly use the characteristics that the noise and the image signal are different in the frequency distribution,the image signal mainly in the low-frequency region, the noise mainly in the high-frequency region, while the details of the image also found in high-frequency region.The image denoising makes the structure information of the original image and detail information easily be extracted. Wavelet transform has a low entropy, multi-resolution, to the relevance and flexibility of selection-based features, which makes wavelet transform achieve a good separation of signal noise in wavelet domain. II. WAVELET THRESHOLD DENOISING At present, Wavelet thresholding method is the most widely used method. It is based on principles of multiresolution analysis, for the signal and noise have different singularity, as the scale increases. Wavelet Modulus Maxima also increased, while the noise, just the opposite. Take advantage of this feature,it can effectively remove
978-0-7695-4073-3/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICFPEE.2010.8

s (i ) = f (i ) + e(i ), i = 0,1,2,.....n 1,

Of which,f(i) is the expected image,s(i) is the observed noisy image,e(i) is the noise, is the noise variance.The purpose of denoising is to restore the original image from the noised image s(i) and at the same time to maintain the characteristics,optimaizing the mean square deviation ,that is, under a set of orthoqonal basis

B = {gm } , (0m N) decompose

s(i) = f (i) + e(i) ,you

m >=< m >+< m >. can get< Because the wavelet function have good locality in time-frequency domain, the variable metric characteristics make that wavelet transform has a "focus" capability for determining the signal, it can be well said that the local structural features of the signal. Therefore, wavelet transform denoising mainly process the wavelet coefficients using the signal and the singularity that the L ipsch ilz index of noise performed under the local structural features.

s (i ), g

f (i ), g

e(i ), g

III.

FACTORS IN WAVELET DENOISING

There are some factors that we have to take notice in the process of image denoising,such as:selection of threshold function,selection of threshold and de-noising evaluation.Now the article will describe separately. A. Selection of threshold function Shrinking the threshold, the threshold value function reflects the different treatment strategy to several factors, and different estimation methods. The current threshold function mainly has three kinds :hard threshold function, soft-threshold function and semi-soft threshold function, the basic idea is to remove the small wavelet coefficients, contract and reservate the large wavelet coefficients.
3

Hard-thresholding function is to retain the original value for the wavelet coefficients greater than the threshold value, less than the the wavelet coefficients of threshold value set 0. The coefficient follows: y ( i ), y ( i ) > h h (i ) = others 0,

Hh

can be expressed as

other local features, but the image will appear visual distortion such as ringing, pseudo-Gibbs effects. The softthreshold method is much more smooth at handling the results, but it may cause the image distortion such as blurred image. To address this point, Bruce and Gao
BG The presented a semi-soft threshold function. coefficient of expressions such as equation as shown.

Of which,y(i) is the wavelet coefficients; is a given

threshold.Similarly,the soft-thresholding function be expressed as follows: sgn( y ( i )) [ y ( i ) ], y (i )

h s (i ) = 0, others

H s can

is a sign function. Of which: As the figures below respectively show, Hardthresholding function and soft-thresholding function. the horizontal axis indicated that the original signal wavelet coefficients, longitudinal coordinates show the signal after the threshold of wavelet coefficients.

sgn()

1 and 2 are called under the threshold and = 2 ,the threshold the threshold. As can be seen, when 1
Of which: value can be transformed into the form of a hard form, when 2 ,it can be transformed into the form of soft-thresholding. This method is a compromise form of soft-thresholding and hard thresholding. It not only retains the larger coefficient, while mesh continuity. In this method, however, it need to determine two thresholds, increasing the complexity of the algorithm. someone proposed a new thresholding function, by changing the index parameters can be different de-noising effect. However, the threshold values for the parameters of the function, in the practical application is not conducive to select the appropriate parameters. In order to overcome these shortcomings, this paper has been improved its type,which shows as follows.
1 e y (i ) > 1 ( ) , h(i ) = y (i ) others 0,

0, y (i ) 1 2 ( y (i ) 1 ) hBG (i) = sgn( y (i )) , 1 < y (i ) 2 ( 2 1 ) y (i ) y (i ) > 2 y (i )

Figure 1. Hard- thresholding function

e (0,1] . From the equation above,we can see, when e = 1 it is equivalent to the softOf which:parameters thresholding function; when e tends to 0, is equivalent to hard thresholding function; obviously, the threshold function can be compromised the values in hard threshold and soft threshold, to obtain a better denoising effect, the improved soft-threshold function curve is a better more flexible options between soft threshold and hard threshold that can adapt to the characteristics of noisy signals. In addition, the improved thresholding function of the parameters it easy to select.

Figure 2. Soft-thresholding function

In the Gaussian noise conditions, hard thresholding methods often makes the results a larger variance (mainly due to the non-continuity after filtering), while the softthreshold method makes the results a large deviation after filtering (mainly because of the contraction that made for all coefficients greater than the threshold value). In general, the hard threshold method can keep a good image edge and

B. Threshold Selection Besides the selection of the threshold function,for the Wavelet threshold de-noising method , another key factor is the threshold specific estimates. If the threshold is too small, the de-noising image is still exist after de-noising, of the contrary, if the threshold is too large, the important image features will be filtered out, causing deviation; from an intuitive point of view, for a given wavelet coefficient, the larger the noise,the larger the threshold. For the softthreshold strategy, reconstructed image becomes blurred, hard threshold strategy of the reconstructed image with more pseudo-edge. Threshold de-noising in wavelet

domain, the selection of threshold can directly affect on filtering effect. At present,current threshold is divided into the global threshold value and the local threshold categories. Global threshold are unit for all of the layers of wavelet coefficients or wavelet coefficients within the same layer; local threshold determine the appropriate local threshold based on the surrounding circumstances of the current coefficient and is more flexible. Here are a few classic threshold estimation. 1) VisuShirnk It is proposed by Donoho and Johnstone in 1994, and is the first wavelet threshold shrinkage denoising method. It is came to the conclusion that the number tends to infinity for the multi-dimensional joint distribution of independent normal variables, that is the coefficient tends to zero when the coefficient is greater than the threshold. The choice of thresholds is to meet = n 2 ln N of which n is the noise variance, N is the length of the signal. 2) SureShrink It is an adaptive threshold selection based on Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimate (Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimation, SURE) criteria,it is a conclusion specific to the soft thresholding function and the criterion is meanvariance unbiased estimation criteria and SureShrink threshold tends to the ideal threshold. For a given threshold , the likelihood to get it, and then to minimize the non-likelihood, we get the selected threshold. It is a soft estimator. 3) HeurSure It is integrated by the first two thresholds,and the choice is the best predictor variable thresholds. If the ratio that signal to noise is very low, there is a great noise by Sure estimated, in this case, we need to adopt a fixed threshold value form; in the high SNR case,the effect of de-nosing generated by Sure is not obvious, while,we can select a lesser value as a threshold from the former two kinds of automatic threshold selection by using heuristic function .in this test ,we you this method testy the image. 4) Minmax It is based on minimax criterion (Minmax criteria) to select the threshold value, used is a fixed threshold, it generates a minimum mean-square error of the extreme, rather than error-free. Statistically, this maximum principle for the design of estimator. In a given function in the maximum mean square error is minimized. C. De-noising Evaluation In order to select the optimal wavelet denoising parameters,we need to set the evaluation criteria as a basis for de-noising effect. In signal processing, the ratio signal to noise and peak errors are two commonly indicators as a measure of the effectiveness of the signal de-noising. a) signal to noise ratio(SNR) The formula:

b) Peak error The formula: =

I max I d I max

max

Of which, max and d max are respectively the peak of real signal and the de-noising signal. The smaller the error after the peak de-noising, the better of its de-noising. These two indicators have avoided the noncomparable problems brought by evaluation of signal data due to the different orders of magnitude. If the ratio signal to noise after de-noising is greater,at the same time the peak is closer to 0, then it shows that the parameters of the wavelet de-noising results closer to the ideal value. IV.
THE EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

We use a standard gray-scale lena image at size of 512 2 512, adding Gaussian white noise ( = 25 ) after the noise reduction processing, in order to facilitate comparison, besides the approach taken in this paper, also uses a number of classic drop noise methods, such as Donoho soft and hard threshold noise reduction.We use the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) as a standard to judge noise reduction effect.

SNR = 10log(power signal / power noise)

After de-noising,the greater the value of SNR,the better the de-noising effect.

Figure 3. the results of image using different de-noising methods TABLE I.

THE PSNR THAT USING DIFFERENT DE-NOISING METHOD

De-noising method
The noising image Soft threshold method Hard threshod method Method the test used

PSNR 23.1398 26.9302 27.3278 30.2513

texture and details the image quality after denoising are lower. This is due to de-noising the same time, the image useful information is also losses largely for this type of image denoising, we can choose to use a strong directional complex wavelets. In short, the search for more excellent wavelet for image denoising, require further study. REFERENCES
[1] [2] QU Han-zhang, Xu Chen and so on, continuous wavelet transform and its application, Beijing: China Electronic Audio Press, 2002 Ji-Jun Li, Wavelet analysis and its application in signal, image noise in the study: [Master thesis], Xi'an: Xi'an Electronic Science and Technology, 2006,1 Zhang Li, Yang Guoliang. Pairs of wavelet image denoising method of [J]. Guilin Model Technical College Branch School Journal, 2005 (3) LeiZhang,PanlBao.DenoisingbysPatialeorrelationthresholding.IEE ETrans.onCircuitsand Systemfor dooTechnology.2003.13.535 538 Xing-Ming Yang and so on. Based on wavelet multi-resolution analysis and the new adaptive signal de-noising threshold. Hefei University of Technology .2007.30 (12) .1580-1583 Rui-Zhen Zhao. Wavelet theory and its application in image and signal processing algorithms. PhD thesis, Xi'an University of Electronic Science and Technology, 2001

From the figure three and table one ,we can see the method we used has significantly better effect . This method is not only a good noise suppression, obtaining a higher PSNR; and well protected the edge of the image, at the same time protecting the edge, found no effect of pseudo-Gibbs. succinct as possible (for example, do not differentiate among departments of the same organization). This template was designed for two affiliations. V.
CONCLUSION

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According to the experimental results,we can see: for the images that have small texture and detail, this method of de-noising effect is good. With the increase of the

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