Image Denoising Using Sparse Representation and Principal Component Analysis

This study proposes an image denoising algorithm based on sparse representation and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The proposed algorithm includes the following steps. First, the noisy image is divided into overlapped 8 x 8 blocks. Second, the discrete cosine transform is applied as a dictionary for the sparse representation of the vectors created by the overlapped blocks. To calculate the sparse vector, the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm is used. Then, the dictionary is updated by means of the PCA algorithm to achieve the sparsest representation of vectors. Since the signal energy, unlike the noise energy, is concentrated on a small dataset by transforming into the PCA domain, the signal and noise can be well distinguished. The proposed algorithm was implemented in a MATLAB environment and its performance was evaluated on some standard grayscale images under different levels of standard deviations of white Gaussian noise by means of peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity indexes, and visual effects. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed denoising algorithm achieves significant improvement compared to dual-tree complex discrete wavelet transform and K-singular value decomposition image denoising methods. It also obtains competitive results with the block-matching and 3D filtering method, which is the current state-of-the-art for image denoising.