IET Image Processing

Research Article

Curvelet-based multiscale denoising using ISSN 1751-9659

Received on 5th August 2017
Revised 3rd December 2017
non-local means & guided image filter Accepted on 27th December 2017
E-First on 31st January 2018
doi: 10.1049/iet-ipr.2017.0825
www.ietdl.org

Susant Kumar Panigrahi1 , Supratim Gupta1, Prasanna K. Sahu1

1Department of Electrical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela-769008, India
E-mail: susant146@gmail.com

Abstract: This study presents an image denoising technique using multiscale non-local means (NLM) filtering combined with
hard thresholding in curvelet domain. The inevitable ringing artefacts in the reconstructed image – due to thresholding – is
further processed using a guided image filter for better preservation of local structures like edges, textures and small details.
The authors decomposed the image into three different curvelet scales including the approximation and the fine scale. The low-
frequency noise in the approximation sub-band and the edges with small textural details in the fine scale are processed
independently using a multiscale NLM filter. On the other hand, the hard thresholding in the remaining coarser scale is applied
to separate the signal and the noise subspace. Experimental results on both greyscale and colour images indicate that the
proposed approach is competitive at lower noise strength with respect to peak signal to noise ratio and structural similarity index
measure and excels in performance at higher noise strength compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms.

1 Introduction
The restoration of the original image from its noisy observation –
contaminated during acquisition, reception or transmission – is a
stepping stone for many image processing or computer vision
tasks. Often the characteristics of noise depend on the sensor type,
pixel dimension, exposure time, ISO speed, temperature, and
ambient illumination level. However, in most of the applications,
the distribution of noise can be characterised as additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN)
y = z + η, (1)
where y is the observed (noisy) image, z is the latent image and
η ∈ ℵ(0, σ 2) is the Gaussian noise of zero mean and σ 2 variance.
Available denoising methods can be broadly categorised into
three classes: spatial, transform and dual domain approaches. The
underlying idea behind spatial filtering techniques differs only to
the extent of the weights (kernels) that are calculated – either
locally or non-locally – to estimate different data points in an
image [1]. Bilateral filter (BF) [2], non-local means filter (NLM)
[3] and recently proposed guided image filter (GIF) [4] are few
modern edge preserving filters that exploit either local, non-local
or both self-similarity among the image patches for its restoration
in the spatial domain. In contrast to spatial domain approaches,
transform domain techniques represent signals with fewer non-zero
coefficients. A threshold, as given in (2b), is employed in this
approach to separate the signal and the noise subspace for image
restoration
Y γ = Tγ y , (2a)
^ Y γ, if | Y γ | > lγ,
Yγ = (2b)
0, otherwise,
^
z^ = Tγ−1 Y γ . (2c)
Here, the transformed coefficients Y is thresholded at each scale γ
and reconstructed using inverse transform T −1 to generate the
denoised image z^.
The energy-compaction property of several multi-resolution
signal transformation T is proved to be suitable for preserving the
key signal components of the image by thresholding out the noise.
The universal VisuShrink [5], the unbiased estimator-based
SureShrink [6], the Bayesian prior-based BayesShrink [7], the
statistical co-dependent bivariate shrinkage-based BiShrink [8], the
probabilistic shrinkage function-based ProbShrink [9], the linear
weight estimation-based Stein's unbiased risk estimate-linear
expansion of thresholds (SURE-LET) [10] and the recently
proposed NeighShrink [11] are few thresholding techniques (λγ in
(2b)) that were applied in wavelet domain to preserve the high
magnitude signal coefficients. However, the inability of wavelets in
representing the curved edges (C2 singularity) degrades the
performance of wavelet-based image denoising approaches. The
implementation of anisotropic scaling in curvelet transform aides
in representing image edges more sparsely compared with
wavelets. Starck et al. [12] employed hard thresholding on the
magnitude of complex curvelet coefficients for denoising.
However, these transform domain-based thresholding (shrinkage)
techniques suffer from inevitable ringing artefacts due to a sudden
jump in coefficient magnitudes.
Dual domain or hybrid approaches combine the advantages of
both spatial and transform domain techniques to improve the
overall image denoising quality. The multi-resolution BF (MBF)
incorporated both BF and wavelet thresholding in the
approximation and the detail scales to suppress simultaneously the
coarser grain (or low-frequency) and fine grain (or high-frequency)
noise [13]. Knaus et al. [14] proposed a dual domain image
denoising method by integrating joint BF and short time Fourier
transform-based wavelet shrinkage technique. The inability of
wavelets in representing edges [15] and the limitation of BF in
preserving gradient direction of edges [4] may degrade the overall
performance of such techniques. Recently, NLM filter – instead of
BF – has been considered in several kinds of literature to improve
the performance of hybrid domain approaches [16–18]. However,
the block matching 3D collaborative filter (BM3D) excelled in
denoising by grouping the similar (non-local) patches and
collaboratively filtering the 3D blocks using 1D wavelet
thresholding [19]. Though BM3D is considered the state-of-the-art
technique, it is still unable to denoise few homogeneous regions
that manifest as low-frequency noise [20]. Moreover, the patch-
based methods that search for more number of patches with similar
local spatial structures may reduce at a higher noise level and thus
restricts the performance of denoising. Motivated by the fact that
the residual sparsity among the non-local similar patches can be

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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
reduced under a constrained prior model, recently Zha et al. [21]
proposed a new image denoising technique – called group sparsity
residual constrain (GSRC) – to enhance the performance of group-
sparse-based methods (that includes state-of-the-art BM3D
technique). Though the GSRC technique achieves numerically
improved results with a modest increase in visual quality at higher
noise strength, the iterative method puts higher computational
burden. Similarly, the sophisticated Cauchy filter-based image
denoising technique provides comparable results with higher
computation complexity [22].
The NLM – an averaging filter – utilises the similarity among
the patches to denoise the image. Though it is very efficient in
preserving edges, it is unable to process efficiently near the
textured regions. The energy compaction property of the curvelet
that represents any signal in several scales can be used to separate
various spatial frequencies of image efficiently. We have
incorporated the advantages of both (multiscale) NLM filtering and
hard thresholding in three different scales of the curvelet: the
approximation, the coarser and the fine scale. The edge preserving
the property of the non-linear NLM filter ensures the suppression
of noise in the approximation scale and aids in preserving well-
connected edges with small image details in the fine scale. Unlike
multiscale filtering, the hard thresholding in the coarser scale – at
different orientations – is employed to separate the signal from the
insignificant noise coefficients. The inevitable ringing artefacts in
the reconstructed image are further processed by GIF to obtain the
final denoised image. We extend our single channel algorithm to
multichannel colour image denoising using luminance
chrominance colour channels (YUV) colour space transformation.
The performance of the proposed hybrid technique is tested on
both greyscale and colour images. The experimental results –
compared with several state-of-the-art techniques – demonstrate
the competitiveness of the proposed approach at lower noise
strength, while yielding better performance at a higher value of σ .
The rest of the article is organised as follows: we first review
few works related to our methodology in Section 2. The proposed
algorithms for both greyscale and RGB image are explained in
Section 3. The experimental results in terms of denoising quality
and computational complexity are presented and discussed in
Section 4. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper.
2 Background methods
Often, the frequency characteristics of AWGN are neglected in
many image denoising approaches. The noise can be as smooth as
an image or as oscillatory as many fine structures in the image.
Multi-resolution techniques have proven particularly well in
separating signal and noise subspace better at one resolution level
than another. However, simply the hard or soft thresholding at
different resolution levels proved to be inadequate in distinguishing
the fine texture details and the noise. Here, the combined approach
of multiscale NLM filter and hard thresholding in curvelet domain
is considered to remove the noise in more than one resolution level.
We briefly reviewed these methodologies along with GIF – which
is employed to suppress the ringing artefact – in the following
subsections.
2.1 NLM filter
NLM is a non-linear weighted average filter. The weights are
selected using a ‘metric’ that non-locally determines whether the
pixels are similar or not [3]. Assuming any pixel p with its intensity
denoted by y(p), the NLM estimation, NLM [y](p) of the noisy
image y is computed as [3]
1
C(p) q∑
NLM[y](p) = W(p, q)y(q), (3)
∈Ω
where the weight W(p,q) is searched within a neighbouring
window Ω such that
1
C(p) q∑
W(p, q) = 1.
∈Ω
910
The weight represents the similarity between two image patches,
N(p) and N(q), centred at two pixels p and q and it is defined as
∥ y(N(p)) − y(N(q)) ∥22, a
W(p, q) = exp − , (4)
h2
where ∥ ⋅ ∥2,2 a is the Gaussian modulated Euclidean distance
between two patches and a is the standard deviation of the
Gaussian kernel. The parameter h = kσ controls the smoothness of
the denoised image.
Though similar patches are searched in a larger neighbourhood,
it is still local compared with the whole image [23]. Moreover, the
patches of fixed square shape and a fixed scale over the
neighbourhood may limit the performance of the NLM filter [24].
Unlike spatial domain implementation [3], the multiscale NLM
filter has the potential to suppress the noise in the approximation
and in the finest scale by exploiting the advantages of intra-scale
similarities among the curvelet coefficients [25]. Furthermore, the
high energy compactness of these coefficients also aids in the more
accurate estimation of NLM weights in the curvelet domain.
2.2 Curvelet thresholding (CT)
The ‘sparse-land’ modelling represents an image with a few non-
zero coefficients of high magnitude in different resolutions and
directions. Threshold, λγ, o at any scale, γ is derived to separate the
high magnitude signal coefficients from the insignificant noise
component [12]
λγ, o = kσσγ, o, (5)
where k is a scale-dependent constant and the variance σγ2, o is
estimated for each scale, γ and orientation, o using Monte-Carlo
simulations of the Curvelet transform of a few standard white noise
images [12].
As illustrated in Fig. 1, the threshold (as defined in (5)) removes
the noise as well as a few fine details of the image. Moreover, the
ringing artefacts deteriorate the localisation of edges in the
reconstructed image. To minimise the effect, we restrict ourselves
to three decomposition levels. The threshold is then applied in the
coarser scale to separate the insignificant noise coefficients from
the signal. The ringing artefacts in the reconstructed image is
further processed using GIF.
2.3 Guided image filter
GIF is a fast [O(N) for an image with N pixels.], edge-preserving,
locally optimised, linear translation invariant filter [4]. The
optimisation of such a filter consists of two terms: a data term and
a regularisation term. The data term measures the fidelity between
the restored image and the image to be filtered, while the
regularisation term provides the smoothness level of the
reconstructed image. Assuming y(p) to be the noisy image at any
given pixel p, then it can be decomposed into two parts called the
base layer z^(p) and the detail layer e(p)
y(p) = z^(p) + e(p) . (6)
A linear transform of an external image with better detail
information about the input image known as the guidance image, G
is considered in the formulation of GIF to filter the noisy image y
as [4]
z^(p) = ap′G(p) + bp′, ∀p ∈ wς(p′), (7)
where the linear parameters ap′ and bp′ are defined inside a small
window, wς(p′) centred at p′ with radius ς. These parameters
ensure the preservation of edge in z^ if and only if G has an edge,
i.e. ∇z^ = ap′∇G.
IET Image Process., 2018, Vol. 12 Iss. 6, pp. 909-918
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
Fig. 1  Curvelet coefficients of
(a) Clean Lena image 4, (b) Noisy image σ = 25 , (c) Thresholded image
Fig. 2  Performance of CT technique – with NLM filtering in the approximation & the fine scale – in terms of
(a) PSNR, (b) SSIM measure for a number of decomposition levels Nγ
To determine the linear coefficients ap′, bp′ a constraint (as
given in (6)) is added to minimise the cost function E ap′, bp′ ,
which is defined as
E= ∑ (ap′G(p) + bp′ − yi)2 + ϵa2p′ .
p ∈ wς(p′)
Here ϵ denotes the regularisation parameter [the regularisation
parameter, ϵ = k3σ is related to noise standard deviation σ to serve
as a tuning parameter for better edge localisation in the proposed
algorithm] that penalises large ap′. The optimisation of (8) provides
the solution for the linear coefficients ap′, bp′ [4]
1 integrable function f in Curvelet domain obeys Parseval's identity
|w| ∑ p ∈ wς( p′)
G(p)y(p) − μG, ς(p′)μy, ς(p′)
ap′ = , (9)
σG2 , ς(p′) + ϵ
bp′ = μy, ς(p′) − ap′ μG, ς(p′),
where μG, ς(p′) and σG2 , ς(p′) are the mean and variance of G in
wς(p′). Similarly, μy, ς(p′) denotes the mean of the noisy image y.
The final computation of z^(p) assumes the linear coefficients to
be constant in wς(p′) such that
z^(p) = ā pG(p) + b̄ p,
where ā p = (1/( | wς(p′) | ))∑ p′ ∈ wς( p) ap′ and b̄ p =
(1/ | wς(p′) | )∑ p′ ∈ wς(p) bp′ are the average values of ap′ and bp′ for
all the overlapping windows that cover the pixel p.
In the proposed algorithm, GIF is used as an ‘edge-preserving’
filter to suppress the ringing artefacts near edges. Thus, (9) & (10)
being reformulated by assuming G ≡ y, such that
σy2, ς(p′)
ap′ = , (12a)
σy2, ς(p′) + ϵ
bp′ = (1 − ap′)μy, ς(p′) .
IET Image Process., 2018, Vol. 12 Iss. 6, pp. 909-918
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
Therefore, the filtered image z^ in (11) is obtained as the local
combination of some percentage of the input image with its local
mean. In addition, the following observations may be noted:
• Case 1: ϵ ≫ σG2 , ς(p′) : ap′ ≃ 1&bp′ ≃ 0 : GIF preserves the
(8)
details as it encounters ‘edge’.
• Case 2: ϵ ≪ σG2 , ς(p′) : ap′ ≃ 0&bp′ ≃ 1 : GIF filters the image as
it encounters a ‘homogeneous’ region.
3 Proposed denoising framework
The NLM filter requires the noise to remain additive in the
analysing domain. The use of tight frames to represent any square-
as [15]
f = ∑ ⟨ f , ϕγ τ o⟩ϕγ τ o,
, , , , (13)
γ, τ, o
(10)
where ϕγ, τ, o denotes the curvelet basis function. The linearity
property of the curvelet motivated the authors to implement a
(multiscale) NLM filter in the approximation and the fine scale. We
carried out experiments to obtain an optimum number of
decomposition levels Nγ for image restoration using CT under
maximum peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural
(11) similarity index measure (SSIM). Assuming the approximation and
the fine scale coefficients are filtered via NLM and the coarser
scale(s) coefficients are thresholded, the PSNR and SSIM measure
for an image decomposed in four different scales, Nγ = 3, 4, 5, 6 are
calculated. The mean and the standard deviation plot of these
indices for Cameraman image (of size 512 × 512) contaminated
with AWGN of σ between 10 and 75 is shown in Fig. 2. It is
observed that the minimum decomposition levels, Nγ = 3 with only
coarser scale coefficients being thresholded may enhance the
quality of the denoised image.
The ringing artefacts due to hard thresholding in the coarser
scale are further suppressed by incorporating GIF in the
reconstructed image, as shown in Fig. 3. We extend the greyscale
(12b) (single channel) algorithm to multichannel (colour) image
restoration by independently applying it to a ‘decorrelated’
luminance/colour-difference space (YUV) as discussed in Section
3.2.
911
Fig. 3  Illustration of proposed denoising algorithm for greyscale image
Fig. 4  Curvelet based reconstruction from the approximation coefficients of
(a) Original Lena image, (b) Noisy σ = 40 image, (c) NLM-based filtered image
Fig. 5  Curvelet coefficients in the fine scale for
(a) Original texture image, (b) Recovered details from the AWGN of σ = 25 using CT, (c) Recovered details from the AWGN of σ = 25 using NLM-based filtering
Fig. 6  Proposed denoising method for Lena image σ = 40
(a) Before (PSNR = 29.8557, SSIM = 0.8438) the application of GIF, (b) After (PSNR  visual improvement in Fig. 6 and the quantitative improvement in
= 30.2377, SSIM = 0.8752) the application of GIF
3.1 Greyscale image denoising
As illustrated in the block diagram (Fig. 3), the image is initially
decomposed in three different scales in order to consider both the
low-frequency or coarser grain and high-frequency fluctuations or
fine grain noise. The wide range of spatial frequencies of noise is
treated separately in the approximation and the fine scale using a
multiscale NLM filter. The smoothing parameters, h1 = k1 × σ and
h2 = k2 × σ in (4) is tuned independently of different sub-bands.
Fig. 4 illustrates the denoised image reconstructed from the
approximation sub-band [coefficients in all other scales are
assumed to be zero during the reconstruction]. It may be observed
that the coarser grain noises in Fig. 4c are mostly suppressed due to
filtering. Similarly, the effect of the NLM filter in suppressing fine-
grain noise is investigated in Fig. 5. The fine edges and small
details of the clean texture image in Fig. 5a are mostly preserved
912
due to NLM filtering in Fig. 5c. However, the hard thresholding
[12] removes noise as well as many small details of the image in
the fine scale as shown in Fig. 5b. The disconnected edges may
introduce granular artefacts in the final denoised image.
The distortion near edges as shown in Fig. 6a degrade the
overall denoising quality of the reconstructed image. The ‘edge-
aware’ GIF is considered as a post-possessing mechanism to
suppress the ringing artefacts and to preserve the local structures
like edges, textures and small details in the restored image. The
PSNR and SSIM measures validate the consideration of GIF as an
edge preserving filter in the proposed algorithm.
3.2 Colour image denoising
The most straightforward way of multichannel image denoising is
to employ the greyscale algorithm for each colour channel (RGB),
independently. Due to the presence of strong correlation among the
RGB-colour channels, the solution is far from optimum. The most
plausible solution for such separable algorithms is to convert the
(correlated) colour representation into a ‘decorrelated’ luminance/
colour-difference space like YCbCr or YUV. Literature also
indicates that the ‘decorrelated’ colour-space improves the
denoising performance up to 1.1 dB compared with RGB space
[26]. Moreover, a better subjective quality can be obtained for a
machine vision implementation in YUV colour space compared
with RGB space [27]. Therefore, the proposed algorithm, as shown
in Fig. 7, is separately applied in YUV space and transformed back
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Table 1 Optimised parameter values for (both greyscale and colour) proposed image denoising framework
Parameter Symbols Greyscale parameter Colour algorithm parameter
scale-dependent cont. for threshold k 1.8 1.5 (Y-channel)
1.8 (U & V -channel)
NLM filter smoothing parameter k1 0.2 σ ≤ 10 each YUV channel
0.6 σ > 10 0.2 σ ≤ 10
0.6 σ > 10
k2 0.6 0.6
GIF regularisation parameter k3 3.5 σ ≤ 40 each YUV channel reconstructed RGB image
3.5 σ ≤ 40 0.4 σ ≥ 30
5 σ > 40 5 σ > 40

Fig. 7  Illustration of proposed image denoising framework for colour image

into RGB space to obtain the final denoised image using the colour
transform, S (inverse transform, S−1, See (15)) matrix as
T T
yY, yU, yV = S yR, yG, yB
where yRGB and yYUV is the noisy image in RGB and YUV colour
space, respectively (see (15)) Since the U and V channels are more
corrupted compared with the Y channel, we have selected different
scale dependent constant, k for threshold (as given in Table 1).
However, at higher noise strength, σ ≥ 30 the U and V channels
become severely degraded by noise. It requires further processing
to preserve the finest details of the latent image. Thus, we applied
GIF as an additional post-processing step (in the reconstructed
RGB image) to improve the visual quality of the denoised image at
higher noise strength. The same may be ineffective at the lower
noise level.
4 Experimental results & discussion
The overall performance of the proposed algorithm depends on
different regularisation parameters of the filters and the scale-
dependent constant of the curvelet threshold. We investigated the
influence of each parameter to obtain the optimum value for the
highest denoising quality. PSNR and SSIM [28] are adopted in this
study for quantitative evaluation of image denoising quality.
However, for multichannel image denoising, the single channel
SSIM measure is extended as the mean of all the indices calculated
for each colour (RGB) channel [29]. In addition, the accuracy of
the proposed algorithm both in terms of denoising quality and run-
time complexity is evaluated to measure its suitability in time
constrained real-time applications.
4.1 Parameter optimisation
All the parameters in the proposed image denoising algorithm are
uncorrelated to each other. They act independently to improve the
(14) overall performance of the restored image. Therefore, we
separately tuned each parameter at maximum PSNR and SSIM
measure for several noise strengths σ on the greyscale images
shown in Fig. 8 (assuming the other parameters are constant). The
average variations in PSNR and SSIM measure for the smoothing
parameters of NLM filter in the approximation and the fine scale,
k1 & k2 (Eq.4), the scale-dependent threshold variable k (5) and the
regularisation parameter of GIF k3 (7) are shown in Figs. 9 & 10
separately for four different noise strengths σ = 10, 25, 50, 75. The
optimum value of the scale-dependent constant k as shown in
Figs. 9a & 10a ranges between 1.5 and 1.8. Similarly, Figs. 9b, c,
10b & c reveal that the NLM filter smoothing parameters must be
tuned between 0.4 and 0.7, in an approximation sub-band and 0.3–
0.8 in the fine scale, respectively. On the other hand, the
regularisation parameter of GIF, k3 in Figs. 9d & 10d provides the
maximum PSNR and SSIM measure at k3 = [2.5, 5.5]. Table 1
outlines the final selected values used in our algorithm for both
single-channel and colour image denoising.
4.2 Performance evaluation & discussion
The denoising quality of the proposed algorithm was evaluated
qualitatively as well as quantitatively for both greyscale and RGB
images. The experiments were conducted on a few standard
greyscale images as shown in Fig. 8 and on the 24 reference
(colour) images of the TID2008 database [30]. To perpetuate
uniformity in comparison, all the images were resized to 512 × 512
and contaminated with simulated AWGN of standard deviations,
σ = [10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 75]. It may also be noted that the strength of
noise in each RGB channel is considered to be independent and

0.299 0.587 0.114 1 0 1.139

S = −0.147 −0.289 0.436 , S−1 = 1 −0.395 −0.581 . (15)
0.615 −0.515 −0.100 1 2.032 0
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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
Fig. 8  Clean/reference grey images of
(a) Barbara, (b) Boat, (c) Building, (d) Cameraman, (e) Couple, (f) Goldhill, (g) House, (h) Lake, (i) Lena and (j) Peppers
Fig. 9  Plot of average PSNR (in dB) measure for varying parameter
values
(a) Scale-dependant constant for thresholding (k), (b) NLM filter smoothing parameter
in approximation sub-band k1 , (c) Fine scale k2 at different noise strengths σ , (d)
GIF regularisation parameter k3 at different noise strengths σ
equal, i.e. σ  =  σR =  σG =  σB. As illustrated in Section 3.2 the
proposed separable algorithm is applied independently in YUV
colour space. Therefore, the covariance matrix of noise was also
computed for YUV colour space
σR2 0 0
~
T
R = SRS , R= 0 σG2 0 ,
0 0 σB2
where T denotes the transpose of a matrix.
The denoising quality of the proposed algorithm was evaluated
and compared using PSNR (in dB) and SSIM indices. CT [12],
NLM filtering [3], wavelet NeighSURE shrinkage [11], non-sub-
sampled shearlet transformation (NSST)-based hard thresholding
[31], patch-based principal components analysis (PL-PCA) [32],
K-means clustering singular value composition (K-SVD) [33],
MBF [13], NLM method noise thresholding (NLMNT) [17] and
the state-of-the-art BM3D [19] are considered in denoising quality
comparison for the greyscale image. Similarly, the efficacy of the
proposed method for colour image is also compared with CT [12],
NLM [34], MBF [13], multi-channel SURE-LET [26], local pixel
grouping (LPG)-PCA [29] and colour-block matching, sparse 3D
collaborative filtering (CBM3D) [35].
914
Fig. 10  Plot of average SSIM measure for varying parameter values
(a) Scale-dependant constant for thresholding (k), (b) NLM filter smoothing parameter
in approximation sub-band k1 , (c) Fine scale k2 at different noise strengths σ , (d)
GIF regularisation parameter k3 at different noise strengths σ
The experimental results on Lena image corrupted with AWGN
of σ = 40 are shown in Fig. 11 for qualitative assessment. A
portion (patch) of each denoised image is magnified (up to 300%)
to indicate the efficacy of the proposed technique in suppressing
noise while producing sharp edges with a minimum loss of fine
details even at higher noise strength σ = 40 . The quantitative
assessment of the proposed method in terms of mean PSNR and
SSIM for the set of standard greyscale images (Fig. 8) is given in
Table 2. A similar analysis for a colour image in Fig. 12 was also
carried out to exhibit the visual improvement of multichannel
image restoration. To complement the qualitative valuation, we
calculated the corresponding PSNR (in dB) and SSIM measures as
shown in Fig. 12. Table 3 illustrates the mean measures on
TID2008 database [30]. The following few facts may be noticed
from the results
• The three-scale decomposition technique for image denoising
distinctively represents the wide spatial frequency
characteristics of noise in the approximation, coarser and fine
scale. The combination of multiscale NLM and curvelet hard
thresholding are distinctively applied in different scales to
suppress them independently.
• The ‘edge-aware’ GIF [4] is implemented to preserve the local
structures like edges, textures and small details in the restored
image, as shown in Fig. 6.
IET Image Process., 2018, Vol. 12 Iss. 6, pp. 909-918
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Fig. 11  Denoised image obtained using different algorithms for Lena image corrupted with AWGN of σ = 40. The quantitative measures for respective
denoised images are
(a) CT [12]: PSNR = 28.6551, SSIM = 0.832, (b) NLM [3]: PSNR = 28.129, SSIM = 0.785, (c) NeighSURE [11]: PSNR = 29.4010, SSIM = 0.836, (d) NSST [31]: PSNR = 30.390,
SSIM = 0.867, (e) PL-PCA [32]: PSNR = 30.021, SSIM = 0.868, (f) K-SVD [33]: PSNR = 29.746, SSIM = 0.849, (g) MBF [13]: PSNR = 28.849, SSIM = 0.833, (h) HLMNT [17]:
PSNR = 29.0802, SSIM = 0.807, (i) BM3D [20]: PSNR = 29.612, SSIM = 0.854 and (j) Proposed method: PSNR = 30.237, SSIM = 0.875. A patch of each image is magnified for
visual assessment

Fig. 12  Quantitative assessments for the respective denoised images are
(a) Corrupted image σ = 40 : PSNR: 16.093, SSIM: 0.359, (b) CT [12]: PSNR: 29.116, SSIM: 0.830, (c) NLM [34]: PSNR: 27.507, SSIM: 0.758, (d) MBF [13]: PSNR: 26.413,
SSIM: 0.816, (e) MC-SURE-LET [26]: PSNR: 30.498, SSIM: 0.846, (f) LPG-PCA [29]: PSNR: 30.686, SSIM: 0.819, (g) CBM3D [35]: PSNR: 31.113, SSIM: 0.865, (h) Proposed
method: PSNR: 31.135, SSIM: 0.870. A patch of each image is magnified for better visual interpretation

• The spatial edge-preserving filtering in curvelet domain
combined with thresholding enhances the performance of image
denoising at all noise strengths σ compared with the individual
methods of NLM filter [3] and CT [12].
• Compared with other combined approaches in [13, 17], the
proposed technique improves the denoising performance at a
higher noise strengths and provides better and comparable
results – with BM3D [19], GSRC [21] & CBM3D [35] – at
lower σ for both grey and colour image.
For completeness, the competitiveness of the proposed
algorithm is compared with the GIF [4], as shown in Fig. 13. The
results indicate the superiority of the proposed method in
suppressing visible colour artefacts near smooth regions while
preserving the sharp image edges and texture details. Moreover, it
is also known that the denoising quality of GIF depends on another
external input image called the guidance image. Here, the denoised
image in Fig. 13c is restored by utilising the local features of the
flash image in Fig. 13a (which acts as the guidance image, G).
However, the proposed method denoise the image by considering
the content of the input noisy image, exclusively.
The anisotropic scaling of curvelet to represent edges (C2
smooth) with optimal sparsity and the high intra-scale similarity
among the coefficients motivated the authors to consider NLM as a
multiscale filter to suppress noise in different scales. Unlike CT
[12], the proposed multiscale filtering is able to distinguish

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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
Fig. 13  Image denoising performance comparison between the GIF and the proposed approach
(a) Noise-free guidance image (with flash), (b) Input/no-flash image (PSNR = 13.852, SSIM = 0.2254), (c) Denoised image using GIF (PSNR = 14.719, SSIM = 0.435), (d) Denoised
image using proposed approach (PSNR = 14.821, SSIM = 0.457). The quantitative measures are obtained by assuming the flash image as the reference image

Table 2 Mean PSNR (dB) and SSIM measure between original and restored images for different denoising techniques on test
image in Fig. 8
PSNR, dB SSIM [28]
Denoised methods σ = 10 σ = 20 σ = 30 σ = 40 σ = 50 σ = 75 σ = 10 σ = 20 σ = 30 σ = 40 σ = 50 σ = 75
CT [12] 32.592 29.594 28.043 26.960 26.134 24.631 0.938 0.880 0.834 0.797 0.766 0.706
NLM [3] 35.103 31.452 29.035 27.252 25.836 23.167 0.956 0.901 0.839 0.776 0.716 0.585
NeighSURE [11] 34.732 31.022 28.978 27.621 26.609 24.910 0.956 0.905 0.858 0.816 0.780 0.707
NSST [31] 35.284 32.027 30.173 28.885 27.874 26.134 0.959 0.919 0.884 0.852 0.822 0.758
PL-PCA [32] 35.608 32.238 30.026 29.069 27.691 26.002 0.964 0.920 0.887 0.857 0.822 0.754
K-SVD [33] 36.129 32.641 30.484 28.930 27.684 25.487 0.963 0.921 0.879 0.838 0.799 0.711
MBF [13] 33.386 30.107 28.322 27.142 26.291 24.875 0.934 0.882 0.841 0.805 0.773 0.700
NLMNT [17] 34.744 31.690 29.597 27.917 26.501 23.699 0.958 0.907 0.853 0.798 0.746 0.635
BM3D [19] 36.152 32.703 30.574 28.766 27.868 25.629 0.965 0.928 0.889 0.850 0.819 0.737
GSRC [21] 35.373 32.324 30.652 29.024 28.153 26.129 0.958 0.918 0.887 0.858 0.823 0.752
Proposed 35.443 32.081 30.526 29.089 27.927 26.261 0.962 0.919 0.896 0.864 0.826 0.759

Table 3 Mean PSNR (dB) and SSIM measure between original and restored images for different denoising techniques on
TID2008 database [30]
PSNR, dB SSIM [28, 29]
Denoising methods σ = 10 σ = 20 σ = 30 σ = 40 σ = 50 σ = 75 σ = 10 σ = 20 σ = 30 σ = 40 σ = 50 σ = 75
CT [12] 32.118 29.117 27.523 26.474 25.698 24.322 0.883 0.809 0.755 0.715 0.684 0.629
NLM [34] 33.577 30.089 27.864 26.151 24.743 22.015 0.9044 0.821 0.741 0.691 0.603 0.566
MBF [13] 32.634 29.050 26.763 24.973 23.459 20.466 0.883 0.801 0.741 0.694 0.655 0.583
SURE-LET [26] 35.723 31.897 29.820 28.429 27.402 25.654 0.935 0.870 0.817 0.772 0.735 0.662
LPG-PCA [29] 34.974 30.894 28.742 27.279 26.215 24.287 0.935 0.862 0.799 0.743 0.694 0.589
CBM3D [35] 36.546 32.719 30.558 29.046 28.052 26.048 0.943 0.882 0.822 0.766 0.733 0.627
Proposed 35.682 32.142 30.154 28.953 28.143 26.204 0.9318 0.874 0.829 0.777 0.745 0.673

between fine edges and noises both in the approximation and the
fine scale. On the other hand, the spatial domain NLM filter search
for similar patches in a larger neighbouring window (which is
again local [23]) and the similarity among patches further
decreases with higher noise strength. Similarly, the inability of BF
in preserving gradient direction and the limitations of the wavelet
in representing image edges degrade the performance of MBF [13].
The patch-based methods like PL-PCA, LPG-PCA, BM3D and
recently proposed GSRC search for more number of patches with
similar local spatial structures that decrease at a higher noise level
and thus restricts the performance of denoising. However, the
competitiveness of the proposed algorithm is comparable with
several state-of-the-art techniques at lower noise strength but
improves at a higher value of σ for both grey and colour images.
4.3 Computational complexity
The use of fast NLM [34] and GIF O(N) [4] algorithms in our
CT-based hybrid approach aides in minimising the overall
complexity of image denoising. Moreover, the speed of the
operation of the proposed method is accelerated by limiting the
number of decomposition levels to Nγ = 3.
The run-time complexity is compared with the CT technique
[12], BM3D [19], MBF [13] and GSRC [21] techniques. The
experiment was conducted on a greyscale image of dimensions
1024 × 1024, 512 × 512, 256 × 256 and 128 × 128, respectively.
Each algorithm was executed at least 50 times for four different
noise levels, σ = 10, 25, 50, 75. The runtime was computed on a
4.00 GB RAM, 64-bit Intel(R) Core™, i7, 4770 CPU @ 3.40 GHz
PC using MATLAB R2015a. Fig. 14 illustrates the mean–standard
deviation plot of execution time (in seconds) for the corrupted
Lena image denoised using the above methods. It can be observed
that the use of fast filtering algorithms and the limited
decomposition level of the proposed method accelerates the
denoising process and it is comparable with [12]. Unlike, BM3D
[19] and GSRC [21], the complexity of the proposed technique is
independent of noise standard deviation. Moreover, the iterative
GSRC technique achieves a modest increase in denoising quality
(at higher noise strength) with higher implementation complexity.
5 Conclusion
Most image denoising methods assume that the signal is smooth or
piecewise smooth and the noise is oscillatory. However, many fine
structures and small details of an image are as oscillatory as noise,

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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
Fig. 14  Run-time (in s) of MBF [13] (red), BM3D [19] (blue), CT [12] (green), proposed algorithm (magenta) and GSRC [21] (black) for image dimension
of
(a) 1024 × 1024, (b) 512 × 512, (c) 256 × 256 and (d) 128 × 128, respectively, are computed for the AWGN of std. σ = 10, 25, 50, 75
which poses challenges in image modelling. The proposed signal
modelling analysed the image in three curvelet scales to denoise
both the smooth (low-frequency) and oscillatory (high-frequency)
noise. Unlike spatial domain implementation, curvelet domain
implementation of multiscale NLM filter extracts more adequately
the self-similarity among the high correlated coefficients within
individual scales. The visual and quantitative results yield the
potential of multiscale NLM in exploiting self-similarity among the
patches (in curvelet domain) even at higher noise strength
σ ≥ 40 . It is also observed that the implementation of edge
preserving (NLM) filter – instead of hard thresholding – in the
finer scale aides in retaining well-connected edges with small
image details. On the other hand, the application of hard
thresholding in the coarser scale removed the insignificant noise
coefficients from the high magnitude signals. The inevitable
ringing artefacts in the reconstructed image (which is mostly
ignored in many transform domain techniques) is further processed
using GIF to keep the sharp image edges with a minimum loss of
fine details. The results on both greyscale and colour images have
shown encouraging quantitative and qualitative improvement
compared with several state-of-the-art techniques at higher noise
strength. However, the proposed technique unable to preserve the
fine-scale details at lower noise strength requires further study and
it is left as the future scope of the work.
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