Image denoising using contextual modeling of curvelet coefficients

We propose an image denoising method which takes curvelet domain inter-scale, inter-location and inter-orientation dependencies into account in a maximum a posteriori labeling of the curvelet coefficients of a noisy image. The rationale is that generalized neighborhoods of curvelet coefficients contain more reliable information on the true image than individual coefficients. Based on the labeling of coefficients and their magnitudes, a smooth thresholding functional produces denoised coefficients from which the denoised image is reconstructed. We also outline a faster approach to labeling and thresholding, relying on contextual comparisons of coefficients. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on natural and X-ray images show that our method outperforms related multiscale approaches and compares favorably to the state-of-art BM3D method on X-ray data while executing faster.