Abdominal CT image denoising based on a Laplace distribution with local variance in steerable pyramid domain

This paper presents a new image denoising algorithm based on the modeling of coefficients in each subband of steerable pyramid with a Laplacian probability density function (pdf) with local variance. This pdf is able to model the heavy-tailed nature of steerable pyramid coefficients and the empirically observed correlation between the coefficient amplitudes. Within this framework, we describe a novel method for image denoising based on designing a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator, which relies on the zero-mean Laplacian random variables with high local correlation. Despite the simplicity of our spatially adaptive denoising method, both in its concern and implementation, our denoising results achieves better performance than several published methods such as Bayes least squared Gaussian scale mixture (BLS-GSM) technique that is a state-of-the-art denoising technique.