Window shrink contourlet coefficients for image denoising

An adaptive image denosing technique was proposed to achieve the tradeoff between details retain and noises removal. In order to achieve this objective, the contourlet transform was introduced and a new threshold method, namely CWinShrink, is presented. It shrinks the contourlet coefficients with adaptive shrinkage factors. The shrinkage factors were calculated with reference to the sum of squares of the contourlet coefficients within the neighborhood window. This approach achieves enhanced results for images those are corrupted with additive Gaussian noise. In numerical comparisons with various methods, for a set of noisy images (the PSNR range from 10.86dB to 26.91dB), the presented method outperforms VisuShrink and Wiener filter in terms of the PSNR. Experiments also show that this method not only keeps the details of image but also yields denoised images with better visual quality.