Edge-preserving image denoising using a deep convolutional neural network

Abstract

Abstract This paper introduces a novel denoising approach making use of a deep convolutional neural network to preserve image edges. The network is trained by using the edge map obtained from the well-known Canny algorithm and aims at determining if a noisy patch in non-subsampled shearlet domain corresponds to the location of an edge. In the first step of the proposed denoising algorithm, we use the non-subsampled shearlet transform to decompose the noisy image into a low-frequency subband and a series of high-frequency subbands. Subsequently, 3D blocks are formed by stacking 2D blocks of high-frequency subbands along a specific direction. Each 3D patch is then fed to the trained deep convolutional neural network to determine if it belongs to the edge-related class or not. Finally, the NSST (non-subsampled shearlet transform) coefficients belonging to the edge-related class remain unchanged, and those not belonging to the edge-related class are denoised by the shrinkage method using an adaptive threshold. Experimental results on various test images including benchmark grayscale images and medical ultrasound images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance compared to some state-of-the-art denoising approaches.