A wavelet denoising approach based on unsupervised learning model

Abstract Image denoising plays an important role in image processing, which aims to separate clean images from noisy images. A number of methods have been presented to deal with this practical problem over the past several years. The best currently available wavelet-based denoising methods take advantage of the merits of the wavelet transform. Most of these methods, however, still have difficulties in defining the threshold parameter which can limit their capability. In this paper, we propose a novel wavelet denoising approach based on unsupervised learning model. The approach taken aims at exploiting the merits of the wavelet transform: sparsity, multi-resolution structure, and similarity with the human visual system, to adapt an unsupervised dictionary learning algorithm for creating a dictionary devoted to noise reduction. Using the K-Singular Value Decomposition (K-SVD) algorithm, we obtain an adaptive dictionary by learning over the wavelet decomposition of the noisy image. Experimental results on benchmark test images show that our proposed method achieves very competitive denoising performance and outperforms state-of-the-art denoising methods, especially in the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), the structural similarity (SSIM) index, and visual effects with different noise levels.