Image denoising in undecimated dual-tree complex wavelet domain using multivariate t-distribution

Denoising of natural images is a basic problem in image processing. The present paper proposes a new algorithm for image denoising based on the maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimator in undecimated dual-tree complex wavelet transform. The undecimated dual-tree complex wavelet transform (UDT-CWT), along with the directional selectivity of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT), offers exact translational invariance property through removing the down-sampling of filter outputs together with the up-sampling of the complex filter pairs of DT-CWT. These properties are very important in image denoising. The performance of the MAP estimator depends strongly on the probability of noise-free wavelet coefficients. In our proposed denoising method, multivariate t-distribution is applied as the prior probability of noise-free coefficients. The t-distribution can accurately model the statistics of wavelet coefficients, which have peaky and heavy-tailed characteristics. On the other hand, the multivariate model makes it possible to take into account the dependencies of wavelet coefficients and their neighbors. Also, in our work, the necessary parameters of the multivariate distribution will be estimated in a locally-adaptive way to improve the denoising results via using the correlations among the amplitudes of neighbor coefficients. Simulation results delineate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art denoising algorithms in the literature.