Contourlet domain image denoising using the alpha-stable distribution

In this paper, a new contourlet-based method for denoising of images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise is proposed. The alpha-stable distribution is used to model the contourlet coefficients of noise-free images. This model is then exploited to develop a Bayesian minimum mean absolute error estimator. A modified empirical characteristic function-based method is employed for estimating the parameters of the assumed alpha-stable prior. The performance of the proposed denoising method is evaluated by using standard noise-free images corrupted with simulated noise and compared with that of the other state-of-the-art methods. The results show that the proposed method provides values of the peak signal-to-noise ratio higher than that provided by some of the existing techniques along with superior visual quality images.