Wiener discrete cosine transform-based image filtering

Abstract

A classical problem of additive white (spatially uncorrelated) Gaussian noise suppression in grayscale images is considered. The main attention is paid to discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based denoising, in particular, to image processing in blocks of a limited size. The efficiency of DCT-based image filtering with hard thresholding is studied for different sizes of overlapped blocks. A multiscale approach that aggregates the outputs of DCT filters having different overlapped block sizes is proposed. Later, a two-stage denoising procedure that presumes the use of the multiscale DCT-based filtering with hard thresholding at the first stage and a multiscale Wiener DCT-based filtering at the second stage is proposed and tested. The efficiency of the proposed multiscale DCT-based filtering is compared to the state-of-the-art block-matching and three-dimensional filter. Next, the potentially reachable multiscale filtering efficiency in terms of output mean square error (MSE) is studied. The obtained results are of the same order as those obtained by Chatterjee's approach based on nonlocal patch processing. It is shown that the ideal Wiener DCT-based filter potential is usually higher when noise variance is high.