EXPERIMENT NO.

9
TO STUDY DISCRETE WAVELET TRANSFORM (DWT) AND
ITS
APPLICATIONS IN IMAGE PROCESSING

Department of EXTC, SIES GST

EXPERIMENT NO. 9
AIM: To study of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and its applications in
Image processing

OBJECTIVES:
1. To understand concept of Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT)
2. To understand its applications in the field of Image processing
THEORY: The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) of image signals produces
a non-redundant image representation, which provides better spatial and
spectral localization of image formation, compared with other multi scale
representations such as Gaussian and Laplacian pyramid. Recently, Discrete
Wavelet Transform has attracted more and more interest in image de-noising.
The DWT can be interpreted as signal decomposition in a set of independent,
spatially oriented frequency channels. The signal S is passed through two
complementary filters and emerges as two signals, approximation and Details.
This is called decomposition or analysis. The components can be assembled
back into the original signal without loss of information. This process is called
reconstruction or synthesis.
Before we define the discrete wavelet transform, it is essential to define the
wavelets in terms of discrete values of the dilation and translation parameters a
& b instead of being continuous. There are many ways we can discretize a & b
and then represent the discrete wavelets accordingly. The most popular
approach of discretizing a and b

where m and n are integers. Substituting a and b in Eq. 5.2 by Eq. 5.7, the
discrete wavelets can be represented by
There are many choices to select the values of ao and bo. We select the most
common choice here: a0 = 2 and bo = 1; hence, a = 2" and b = n2m. Using
these values, we can represent the discrete wavelets which constitutes a family
of orthonormal basis functions,

Department of EXTC, SIES GST

In general, the wavelet coefficients for function f(t) are given by

and hence for dyadic
decomposition, the wavelet coefficients can be derived accordingly as
This allows us to reconstruct the signal f(t) in from the discrete wavelet
coefficients as

The transform shown is called the wavelet series, which is analogous to the
Fourier series because the input function f(t) is still a continuous function
whereas the transform coefficients are discrete. This is often called the discrete
time wavelet transform (DTWT). When the input function f(t) as well as the
wavelet parameters a and b are represented in discrete form, the transformation
is commonly referred to as the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) of signal f(t).
The DWT is being increasingly used for image compression due to the fact that
the DWT supports features like progressive image transmission (by quality, by
resolution), ease of compressed image manipulation, region of interest coding,
etc. DWT is the basis of the new JPEG2000 image compression standard
IMPLEMENTATION: The simple approach for 2D implementation of the
DWT is to perform the one dimensional DWT row-wise to produce an
intermediate result and then perform the same one-dimensional DWT columnwise on this intermediate result to produce the final result. This is possible
because the two-dimensional scaling functions can be expressed as separable
functions which are the product of two one-dimensional scaling functions such
as 2 (x,y) = 1(x)* 2(y). The same is true for the wavelet function (x, y)
as well. Applying the one-dimensional transform in each row, we produce two
sub bands in each row. When the low-frequency sub bands of all the rows (L)
are put together, it looks like a thin version (of size M x N/2) of the input
signal. Similarly we put together the high-frequency sub bands of all the rows
to produce the H sub band of size M x N/2 which contains mainly the highfrequency information around discontinuities (edges in an image) in the input
signal. Then applying a one-dimensional DWT column-wise on these L and H
sub bands (intermediate result), we produce four sub bands LL, LH, HL, and
HH of size M/2 x N/2 respectively. LL is a coarser version of the original input
signal. LH, HL, and HH are the high-frequency sub band containing the detail
information. It should be noted that we could have applied the one-dimensional
DWT column-wise first and then row-wise to achieve the same result.

Department of EXTC, SIES GST

As shown in figure above, the LL1 sub band can be further decomposed into
four sub bands LL2, HL2, LH2, and HH2 based on the principle of multi
resolution analysis. The same computation can continue to further decompose
LL2 into higher levels. In figure above, we show the result of the wavelet
transform at different levels with a real-life image provided by the JPEG2000
standard committee. The sub bands have been normalized to 8 bits for the
purpose of display.
APPLICATIONS:
1) Image Compression:

Figure shows the block diagram of image compression and coding system using

Department of EXTC, SIES GST

DWT. The DWT co-efficient are suitably quantized and the quantized coefficient are grouped within the sub band or across the sub band depending
upon the coding exploited. The grouping basically exploits the self-similarity of
DWT across different sub bands. The quantization and sub band coefficient
grouping are integrated in some coding schemes. Finally, the quantized
coefficients are encoded through a variable length encoder before generating
the encoded bitstream. The decoder performs reverse operation but exact
reconstruction is never possible since quantization is employed. However at
very low bit rate, DWT performs better reconstruction compared to block based
DCT at comparable bit rates and does not suffer from artifacts as in DCT.
2) Image De-noising

All digital images contain some degree of noise. Image denoising algorithm
attempts to remove this noise from the image. Ideally, the resulting de-noised
image will not contain any noise or added artifacts. De-noising of natural
images corrupted by Gaussian noise using wavelet techniques is very effective
because of its ability to
capture the energy of a signal in few energy transform values. The methodology
of the discrete wavelet transform based image de-noising has the following
three steps.
1. Transform the noisy image into orthogonal domain by discrete 2D DWT.
2. Apply hard or soft thresholding the noisy detail coefficients of the DWT.
3. Perform inverse discrete wavelet transform to obtain the de-noised image.
Here, the threshold plays an important role in the denoising process. Finding an
optimum threshold is a tedious process. A small threshold value will retain the
noisy coefficients whereas a large threshold value leads to the loss of
coefficients that carry image signal details. Normally, hard thresholding and
soft thresholding techniques are used for such de-noising process. Hard
thresholding is a keep or kill rule whereas soft
thresholding shrinks the coefficients above the thresholding absolute value. It is
a shrink or kill rule.
3) Image Watermarking:
It consists of two parts namely Watermark embedding and Watermark
Extraction.
Watermark Embedding Process consist of decomposing Original 256256
image into 1-level sub bands using DWT which generate Four sub-bands (LL,
LH, HL, HH) out of which LL (Lowest Level) has selected for watermark
embedding as it contain maximum energy .The Watermark of 128128 is
embedded into LL, Obtained image is called Watermarked Image. Figure below
shows watermark embedding process.

Department of EXTC, SIES GST

Watermark extraction is a process of removing watermark from watermarked

image its opposite process of Watermarking, Inverse Discrete Wavelet
Transform is used for Extraction of Watermark with Daubechies (db1) filter as
shown in Figure above. The Watermarked image is again decomposed using
level 1 IDWT then DWT of image is obtained, DWT image is compared with
Original image and watermark is extracted from watermarked image.
CONCLUSION:

Department of EXTC, SIES GST