MEDINFO 2004 M. Fieschi et al. (Eds) Amsterdam: IOS Press 2004 IMIA.

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Wavelet denoising with generalized cross validation comparison of threshold function

Hideaki Kubotaa, Nobuyoshi Tankia, Takafumi Nanjoa, Kazunori Kawakamia, Youichi Yamazakia, Kenya Murasea
a

Department of Medical Physics Engineering, Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

Abstract In this study, the property of threshold function for wavelet denoising combined with generalized cross validation (GCV) was investigated. Gaussian noise was artificially added to a noise-free image of chest radiograph and GCV wavelet denoising was performed by changing threshold function. Four types of threshold functions (Hard, Soft, Garotte and Firm) were used. The most effective threshold function was Soft. For the other threshold functions, neither prominent improvements nor artifacts were seen. As for the large difference between Soft and the other functions, bias is considered to be one of the causes. Keywords: Wavelet denoising, Threshold function, Generalized cross validation.

Materials and Methods

As noise-free image, we used the image database "Standard Digital Image Database: Chest Lung Nodules and Nonnodules", which was created by Japanese Society of Radiological Technology, in 1998. Zero mean Gaussian noise was added to the noise-free image varying SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) from about 0 to 80 [dB]. Wavelet shrinkages were performed using the optimal threshold obtained by the GCV calculation for each level and component. For the GCV calculation, threshold value was changed from 1%- to 99%- descending order of wavelet coefficients. R (mean square error in wavelet domain) was also calculated for comparison with GCV.

Results Introduction
The main theme in wavelet denoising is how to choose the threshold. If the noise SD (standard deviation) is known, the universal threshold by Donoho and Johnstone becomes an optimum threshold [1]. But generally, the image noise SD is unknown. Jansen et al. proposed to use generalized cross validation (GCV) to determine an optimum threshold in wavelet domain for noise reduction [2]. GCV, which is the function of a threshold, is able to calculate without the information of the noise SD. They used the equation of R as mean square error (MSE) in wavelet domain. R includes the information of a noise-free image and is used for comparison with GCV. The GCV method for threshold estimation is proved to be asymptotically optimal, i.e., the minimizer of GCV also minimizes the mean square error of the threshold coefficients for a large number of coefficients. For finite wavelet coefficients, it gives better estimates of the optimal threshold than the universal threshold. In this study, 4 types of threshold functions (hard, soft, garrote and firm [3]) were applied to choose the optimal threshold combining with the GCV method. The most effective threshold function was soft. When soft was used, the improvement of 10.1 [dB] was found at 7.5 [dB] of noised image, and the improvement of 3.9 [dB] was found at 19.6 [dB]. However, when the SNR of a noised image exceeded 30 [dB], an artifact was produced. When the SNR of a noised image was 40.3 [dB], the SNR after processing decreased by 7.2 [dB]. For the other threshold functions, neither improvements nor artifacts were seen. As for the large difference between soft and the other functions, bias is considered to be one of the causes. Only the "soft" threshold has a large bias at high wavelet coefficients.

References
[1] Donoho D L. De-noising by Soft-thresholding: IEEE Trans. Information Theory 1995:41:613-627. [2] Jansen M. J, Malfait M, and Bultheel A. Generalized cross validation for wavelet thresholding. Signal Processing 1997: 56:33-44. [3] Gao Hong-Ye. Wavelet Shrinkage Denoising Using the Non-Negative Garrote. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 1998:l7:469-488.

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