Low-dose computed tomography image denoising based on joint wavelet and sparse representation

Image denoising and signal enhancement are the most challenging issues in low dose computed tomography (CT) imaging. Sparse representational methods have shown initial promise for these applications. In this work we present a wavelet based sparse representation denoising technique utilizing dictionary learning and clustering. By using wavelets we extract the most suitable features in the images to obtain accurate dictionary atoms for the denoising algorithm. To achieve improved results we also lower the number of clusters which reduces computational complexity. In addition, a single image noise level estimation is developed to update the cluster centers in higher PSNRs. Our results along with the computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm clearly demonstrates the improvement of the proposed algorithm over other clustering based sparse representation (CSR) and K-SVD methods.