Image denoising via Bayesian estimation of local variance with Maxwell density prior

Abstract

The need for efficient image denoising methods has grown with the massive production of digital images and movies of all kinds. The distortion of images by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is common during its processing and transmission. This paper is concerned with dual-tree complex wavelet-based image denoising using Bayesian techniques. Indeed, one of the cruxes of the Bayesian image denoising algorithms is to estimate the local variance of the image. Here, we employ maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation to calculate local observed variance with Maxwell density prior for local observed variance and Gaussian distribution for noisy wavelet coefficients. Evidently, our selection of prior distribution is motivated by analytical and computational tractability. The experimental results show that the proposed method yields good denoising results.