LAPB: Locally adaptive patch-based wavelet domain edge-preserving image denoising

Image denoising is one of the most diversified research areas in the field of image processing and computer vision. It is highly desirable for a denoising technique to preserve important image features, such as edges, corners and other sharp structures of an image, after denoising. Wavelet transforms show excellent proficiency in providing efficient edge-preserving image denoising, due to their capability of suppressing noisy signals from an image. This paper presents a novel edge-preserving image denoising technique based on wavelet transforms. The multi-level decomposition of the noisy image is carried out to transform the data into the wavelet domain. A locally adaptive patch-based (LAPB) thresholding scheme is used to effectively reduce noise while preserving relevant features of the original image. Experimental results on benchmark test images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive denoising performance in comparison to various state-of-the-art algorithms. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.