Image denoising using bilateral filter and Gaussian scale mixtures in shiftable complex directional pyramid domain

For image denoising, the main challenge is how to preserve the information-bearing structures such as edges and textures to get satisfactory visual quality when improving the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). Edge-preserving image denoising has become a very intensive research topic. In this paper, we describe a method for removing noise from digital images, based on bilateral filter and Gaussian scale mixtures (GSM) in shiftable complex directional pyramid (also named Pyramidal Dual-Tree Directional Filter Bank, PDTDFB) domain. Firstly, the noisy image is decomposed into different subbands of frequency and orientation responses using a PDTDFB transform. Secondly, the bilateral filter, which is a nonlinear filter that does spatial averaging without smoothing edges, is applied on the approximation subband. Finally, the distribution of detail subbands of PDTDFB coefficients is modeled with GSM, and the statistical model is then used to obtain the denoised detail coefficients from the noisy image decomposition by Bayes least squares estimator. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can obtain better performances in terms of both subjective and objective evaluations than those state-of-the-art denoising techniques. Especially, the proposed method can preserve edges very well while removing noise.