Adaptive Fractal and Wavelet Image Denoising

The need for image enhancement and restoration is encountered in many practical applications. For instance, distortion due to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) can be caused by poor quality image acquisition, images observed in a noisy environment or noise inherent in communication channels. In this thesis, image denoising is investigated. After reviewing standard image denoising methods as applied in the spatial, frequency and wavelet domains of the noisy image, the thesis embarks on the endeavor of developing and experimenting with new image denoising methods based on fractal and wavelet transforms. In particular, three new image denoising methods are proposed: context-based wavelet thresholding, predictive fractal image denoising and fractal-wavelet image denoising. The proposed context-based thresholding strategy adopts localized hard and soft thresholding operators which take in consideration the content of an immediate neighborhood of a wavelet coefficient before thresholding it. The two fractal-based predictive schemes are based on a simple yet effective algorithm for estimating the fractal code of the original noise-free image from the noisy one. From this predicted code, one can then reconstruct a fractally denoised estimate of the original image. This fractal-based denoising algorithm can be applied in the pixel and the wavelet domains of the noisy image using standard fractal and fractal-wavelet schemes, respectively. Furthermore, the cycle spinning idea was implemented in order to enhance the quality of the fractally denoised estimates. Experimental results show that the proposed image denoising methods are competitive, or sometimes even compare favorably with the existing image denoising techniques reviewed in the thesis. This work broadens the application scope of fractal transforms, which have been used mainly for image coding and compression purposes

Simultaneous denoising and enhancement of signals by a fractal conservation law

In this paper, a new filtering method is presented for simultaneous noise reduction and enhancement of signals using a fractal scalar conservation law which is simply the forward heat equation modified by a fractional anti-diffusive term of lower order. This kind of equation has been first introduced by physicists to describe morphodynamics of sand dunes. To evaluate the performance of this new filter, we perform a number of numerical tests on various signals. Numerical simulations are based on finite difference schemes or Fast and Fourier Transform. We used two well-known measuring metrics in signal processing for the comparison. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the well-known Savitzky-Golay filter in signal denoising. Interesting multi-scale properties w.r.t. signal frequencies are exhibited allowing to control both denoising and contrast enhancement

Combining local regularity estimation and total variation optimization for scale-free texture segmentation

Texture segmentation constitutes a standard image processing task, crucial to many applications. The present contribution focuses on the particular subset of scale-free textures and its originality resides in the combination of three key ingredients: First, texture characterization relies on the concept of local regularity ; Second, estimation of local regularity is based on new multiscale quantities referred to as wavelet leaders ; Third, segmentation from local regularity faces a fundamental bias variance trade-off: In nature, local regularity estimation shows high variability that impairs the detection of changes, while a posteriori smoothing of regularity estimates precludes from locating correctly changes. Instead, the present contribution proposes several variational problem formulations based on total variation and proximal resolutions that effectively circumvent this trade-off. Estimation and segmentation performance for the proposed procedures are quantified and compared on synthetic as well as on real-world textures

A statistical reduced-reference method for color image quality assessment

Although color is a fundamental feature of human visual perception, it has been largely unexplored in the reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) schemes. In this paper, we propose a natural scene statistic (NSS) method, which efficiently uses this information. It is based on the statistical deviation between the steerable pyramid coefficients of the reference color image and the degraded one. We propose and analyze the multivariate generalized Gaussian distribution (MGGD) to model the underlying statistics. In order to quantify the degradation, we develop and evaluate two measures based respectively on the Geodesic distance between two MGGDs and on the closed-form of the Kullback Leibler divergence. We performed an extensive evaluation of both metrics in various color spaces (RGB, HSV, CIELAB and YCrCb) using the TID 2008 benchmark and the FRTV Phase I validation process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework to achieve a good consistency with human visual perception. Furthermore, the best configuration is obtained with CIELAB color space associated to KLD deviation measure

Denoising by multiwavelet singularity detection

Wavelet denoising by singularity detection was proposed as an algorithm that combines Mallat and Donoho’s denoising approaches. With wavelet transform modulus sum, we can avoid the error and ambiguities of tracing the modulus maxima across scales and the complicated and computationally demanding reconstruction process. We can also avoid the visual artifacts produced by shrinkage. In this paper, we investigate a multiwavelet denoising algorithm based on a modified singularity detection approach. Improved signal denoising results are obtained in comparison to the single wavelet case

Fractal Image Coding as Projections Onto Convex Sets

Abstract. We show how fractal image coding can be viewed and gen-eralized in terms of the method of projections onto convex sets (POCS). In this approach, the fractal code denes a set of spatial domain sim-ilarity constraints. We also show how such a reformulation in terms of POCS allows additional contraints to be imposed during fractal image decoding. Two applications are presented: image construction with an incomplete fractal code and image denoising.