Joint denoising and contrast enhancement for light microscopy image sequences

This paper describes a novel method for preprocessing of microscopy images by means of denoising and contrast enhancement in the wavelet domain. A non-linear enhancement function has been designed based on the local dispersion of the wavelet coefficients modelled as a bivariate Cauchy distribution. Within the same statistical framework, a simultaneous noise reduction in the image is performed by means of a shrinkage function, thus preventing noise amplification. The proposed method has been tested on a light microscopy image dataset and has been shown to greatly enhance the low-contrast noisy images while outperforming other state-of-art contrast enhancement methods.