SURE-LET for Orthonormal Wavelet-Domain Video Denoising

We propose an efficient orthonormal wavelet-domain video denoising algorithm based on an appropriate integration of motion compensation into an adapted version of our recently devised Stein´s unbiased risk estimator-linear expansion of thresholds (SURE-LET) approach. To take full advantage of the strong spatio-temporal correlations of neighboring frames, a global motion compensation followed by a selective block-matching is first applied to adjacent frames, which increases their temporal correlations without distorting the interframe noise statistics. Then, a multiframe interscale wavelet thresholding is performed to denoise the current central frame. The simulations we made on standard grayscale video sequences for various noise levels demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution in reducing additive white Gaussian noise. Obtained at a lighter computational load, our results are even competitive with most state-of-the-art redundant wavelet-based techniques. By using a cycle-spinning strategy, our algorithm is in fact able to outperform these methods.