Adaptive Bayesian Denoising for General Gaussian Distributed (GGD) Signals in Wavelet Domain

TL;DR

This paper introduces R-BayesShrink, an adaptive wavelet thresholding method based on Bayesian estimation for GGD signals, improving denoising performance by tailoring thresholds to signal distribution.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous theoretical foundation for BayesShrink, generalizes it for GGD signals, and demonstrates its optimality and improved denoising performance.

Findings

R-BayesShrink outperforms traditional methods in PSNR and SSIM.

The method adapts thresholds to wavelet coefficient distributions.

BayesShrink is a special case within the proposed framework.

Abstract

Optimum Bayes estimator for General Gaussian Distributed (GGD) data in wavelet is provided. The GGD distribution describes a wide class of signals including natural images. A wavelet thresholding method for image denoising is proposed. Interestingly, we show that the Bayes estimator for this class of signals is well estimated by a thresholding approach. This result analytically confirms the importance of thresholding for noisy GGD signals. We provide the optimum soft thresholding value that mimics the behavior of the Bayes estimator and minimizes the resulting error. The value of the threshold in BayesShrink, which is one of the most used and efficient soft thresholding methods, has been provided heuristically in the literature. Our proposed method, denoted by Rigorous BayesShrink (R-BayesShrink), explains the theory of BayesShrink threshold and proves its optimality for a subclass of GDD signals. R-BayesShrink improves and generalizes the existing BayesShrink for the class of GGD signals. While the BayesShrink threshold is independent from the wavelet coefficient distribution and is just a function of noise and noiseless signal variance, our method adapts to the distribution of wavelet coefficients of each scale. It is shown that BayesShrink is a special case of our method when shape parameter in GGD is one or signal follows Laplace distribution. Our simulation results confirm the optimality of R-BayesShrink in GGD denoising with regards to Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM) index.