Video Denoising Using Motion Compensated 3-D Wavelet Transform With Integrated Recursive Temporal Filtering

A novel framework of the motion-compensated 3-D wavelet transform (MC3DWT) for video denoising is presented in this paper. The motion-compensated temporal wavelet transform is first performed on a sliding window of video frames consisting of previously denoised frames and the current noisy frame. The 2-D spatial wavelet transform is then performed on the temporal subband frames, thus realizing a 3-D wavelet transform. Any of established wavelet-based still image denoising algorithms can then be applied to the high-pass 3-D subbands. The operation of the inverse 2-D spatial wavelet transform followed by the inverse temporal wavelet transform reconstructs the video frames in the buffer. The denoised current frame may be used as an output for real-time processing; meanwhile, the past frames can be updated, one of which may be used as a delayed output for post-processing or for real-time processing that allows some amount of delay. The proposed MC3DWT framework integrates both the spatial filtering and recursive temporal filtering into the 3-D wavelet domain and effectively exploits both the spatial and temporal redundancies. Experimental results have demonstrated a superior visual and quantitative performance of the proposed scheme for various levels of noise and motion.