Image denoising in extended Shearlet domain using hidden Markov tree models

Denoising of images is one of the most basic tasks of image processing. It is a challenging work to design an edge-preserving image denoising scheme. Extended discrete Shearlet transform (extended DST) is an effective multi-scale and multi-direction analysis method; it not only can exactly compute the Shearlet coefficients based on a multiresolution analysis, but also can provide nearly optimal approximation for a piecewise smooth function. In this paper, a new image denoising approach in extended Shearlet domain using hidden Markov tree (HMT) model is proposed. Firstly, the joint statistics and mutual information of the extended DST coefficients are studied. Then, the extended DST coefficients are modeled using an HMT model with Gaussian mixtures, which can effectively capture the intra-scale and inter-scale dependencies. Finally, the extended Shearlet HMT model is applied to image denoising. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our extended Shearlet HMT denoising method can obtain better performances in terms of both subjective and objective evaluations than other state-of-the-art HMT denoising techniques. Especially, the proposed method can preserve edges very well while removing noise.