SURE-LET interscale-intercolor wavelet thresholding for color image denoising - art. no. 67011H

We propose a new orthonormal wavelet thresholding algorithm for denoising color images that are assumed to be corrupted by additive Gaussian white noise of known intercolor covariance matrix. The proposed wavelet denoiser consists of a linear expansion of thresholding (LET) functions, integrating both the interscale and intercolor dependencies. The linear parameters of the combination are then solved for by minimizing Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE), which is nothing but a robust unbiased estimate of the mean squared error (MSE) between the (unknown) noise-free data and the denoised one. Thanks to the quadratic form of this MSE estimate, the parameters optimization simply amounts to solve a linear system of equations.