Combining Curvelet Transform and Wavelet

Transform for Image Denoising

Ying Li 1,2, Shengwei Zhang2, and Jie Hu1

1
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, 710072, China
lybyp@nwpu.edu.cn
2
National Key Laboratory of Fire Control Technology, Luoyang 471009, China

Abstract. Wavelet transform has the good characteristic of time-frequency

locality and many researches show that it can perform well for denoising in
smooth and singular areas. But it isnt suitable for describing the signals, which
have high dimensional singularities. Curvelet is one of new multiscale
transform theories, which possess directionality and anisotropy, and it breaks
some inherent limitations of wavelet in representing directions of edges in
image. So it has superiority in some image analysis, such as image denoising.
This paper proposes a new method for denoising, which combines curvelet
transform and wavelet transform. The experiment indicates that this method has
better performance.

Keywords: Curvelet transform; Wavelet transform; Image denoising.

1 Introduction

Over the last decade, there has been abundant interest in the wavelet methods for
image denoising. However, the wavelet transform isnt suitable for describing the
signals, which have high dimensional singularities. So some characters like edges will
be blurred after filtering by wavelet transform.
To overcome the shortcomings of the wavelet transform, and to detect, represent
and process high-dimensional data, Multi-scale geometric analysis has been further
developed [1]. Among them, Donoho et al.[4] proposed the concept of curvelets,
which express directly the edge of the image, and can be better suited to the
characteristics of the image. Meanwhile, the curvelet transform is anisotropy, which
can provide more information for image processing. However, the curvelets dont
work well in the smooth areas. So Saevarsson et al.[5][6] presented a new method,
adaptive combined method (ACM), which combined the curvelet transform and the
wavelet transform. This method has many merits in image denoising. But there are
still many problems unsolved.
This paper firstly introduces the stationary wavelet transform and curvelet
transform, and then proposes a new method to improve some problems in ACM.
Experimental results indicate that the performance of the proposed combined method

D.-S. Huang et al. (Eds.): ICIC 2010, LNAI 6216, pp. 317324, 2010.
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
318 Y. Li, S. Zhang, and J. Hu

is more efficient than that of the stationary wavelet transform, the curvelet transform
and ACM.

2 Stationary Wavelet Transform

With the development of wavelets, wavelet transforms have become very popular in
the last decade. Generally there are two kinds of wavelet decomposition namely
Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT).
Mallat algorithm is DWTs fast algorithm, and its basic idea is that the wavelet
coefficients and smooth coefficients are obtained by means of the low-pass filter and
high-pass filter, and decimating the results. Dissimilar to DWT, the output of the filter
banks is not sub-sampled in SWT decomposition between levels. Although this
introduces a large amount of redundancy into the transform, it provides translation
invariant and this property yields a better denoising performance.
It is clear that SWT is much more complicated than DWT. However, there exists a
very efficient algorithm to implement is, called the trous algorithm [2][3]. This
algorithm decomposes the input signal into two parts, wavelet coefficient wi ( n) and
scale coefficient ci (n) :
wi +1 (n) = g (2 j k ) ci (n k )
k

ci +1 (n) = h(2 j k ) ci (n k ) (1)

k

where g (2 j k ) and h(2 j k ) are the scale expands of g (k ) and h(k ) , that is to
say, insert 2 1 zeros into the filter coefficients. And the reconstruction is obtained
j

by
ci (n) = h (2 j n k ) ci +1 (n) + gi (2 j n k ) wi +1 (n) (2)
k k

This Algorithm also can be extended to 2D, by

c j +1,k ,l = (h(2 j k )h(2 j l ) * c j ) k ,l

w j +1,1, k ,l = (h(2 j k ) g (2 j l ) * c j ) k ,l
w j +1,2,k ,l = ( g (2 j k )h(2 j l )* c j ) k ,l
w j +1,3,k ,l = ( g (2 j k ) g (2 j l ) * c j ) k ,l (3)

where c j is called the approximated sub-band and w j is called as detailed

components. Fig. 1 shows the decomposition filter bank structure of SWT.