Wavelet-based image enhancement using fourth order PDE

The presence of noise interference signal may cause problems in signal and image analysis; hence signal and image de-noising is often used as a preprocessing stage in many signal processing applications. In this paper, a new method is presented for image de-noising based on fourth order partial differential equations (PDEs) and wavelet transform. In the existing wavelet thresholding methods, the final noise reduced image has limited improvement. It is due to keeping the approximate coefficients of the image unchanged. These coefficients have the main information of the image. Since noise affects both the approximate and detail coefficients, in this research, the anisotropic diffusion technique for noise reduction is applied on the approximation band to alleviate the deficiency of the existing wavelet thresholding methods. The proposed method was applied on several standard noisy images and the results indicate superiority of the proposed method over the existing wavelet-based image de-noising, anisotropic diffusion, and wiener filtering techniques.