2010 International Conference on Measuring Technology and Mechatronics Automation
A New Threshold Function for Signal Denoising Based on
Wavelet Transform
Yating Lin,
Department of Automation, Xiamen University,
Xiamen, 361005, China
e-mail:linyating008@163.com,
Abstract -A novel thresholding function is presented based
on the wavelet thresholding denoising method put forward by
D. L. Donoho and I. M.Johnstone.This new thresholding
function has many advantages over soft- and hard- threshold
function.It is simple in expression and as continuous as the
soft-thresholding function.It also overcomes the shortcoming
that there is an invariable dispersion between the estimated
wavelet coefficients and the decomposed wavelet coefficients of
the soft- thresholding method. At the same time , the new
thresholding function is more elastic than the soft- and hard-
thresholding,function.MATLAB Simulation results indicate
that the denoising method adopting the new thresholding
function suppresses the Pseudo-Gibbs phenomena near the
singularities of the signal effectively , and the numerical
results also show the new method gives better SNR gains than
DJps hard- and soft-thresholding methods.
Key Words -Wavelet transform; MATLAB; threshold-
function;SNR
I .INTRODUCTION
The appearance of wavelet has aroused the widespread
interest in the field of mathematics, its theory and
application obtained the unprecedented development, and it
has become a main research direction of the signal and
image processing. The wavelet theory and application as an
important branch, the wavelet filter's theory and application
978-0-7695-3962-1/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICMTMA.2010.347
Jianli Cai,
Department of Automation, Xiamen University
Xiamen, 361005, China
e-mail:cjl701@sina.com,
1
also obtained the prodigious development for several
years,which symbolizes the emergence of a kind of new
signal filtering method.
The method of wavelet threshold value filtering is a
kind of the simplest realization, the smallest calculation, so
it has been widely applied. But its threshold value's
selection is quite difficult, although Donoho has proved
theoretically and has found the general threshold value, the
results are unsatisfactory in the practical application.And
that there are two aspects in the improvement of threshold
value method: First, it proposes the new threshold value
method based on wavelet transformation and it will be
applied to the signal filtering and the image compression;
Second, it mainly research on the parameter selection
algorithm of semi-soft threshold function in the wavelet
threshold value function. Combined with the grey incidence
degree theory and fuzzy theory, a new parameters
algorithm will be proposed, and it can reduce the
complexity of algorithm, finally, it will be applied to the
different signals, and the results are satisfactory.The result
for that further demonst ratesthe superiority and
effectiveness of this method.
II.DENOISINGBASED ON WAVELET
TRANSFORM
A. WaveletThresholding Algorithm
In the traditional Fourier-based signal processing, the
out-of-band noise can be removed by applying a linear
1
Jianli Cai is a corresponding author
200
time-invariant filtering approach; however, it cannot be
removed from the portions where it overlaps the signal
spectrum. The denoising technique used in wavelet analysis
is based on the assumption that the amplitude rather than
the location of the spectrum of the signal is different from
the noise. The localising property of the wavelet aids
thresholding and shrinking the wavelet coefficients, which
helps to separate the signal from noise.
Denoising by wavelet is quite different from
traditionalfiltering approaches because it is nonlinear
owing to a thresholding step [1].
Suppose that the clean signal s(k) of length N is
corrupted by white noise e(k), e(k)with standard normal
distribution N(0, 2 ) ,to give the noisy signal f(k) which is
given by Donoho in [2] , shown as (1):
f(k)=s(k)+e(k) 1 k N (1)
Decomposition of the signal f(k) is performed by
levels J. If the noise energy is obviously less than signal
energy, the corresponding noise wavelet coefficients will
obviously smaller than the signal wavelet coefficients,
select a suitable thresholding to set the wavelet coefficients
which below the thresholding to zero and remain or shrink
the wavelet coefficients which higher than the thresholding.
The Donoho s wavelet denoising algorithm (i.e., the
SURE shrinkage) is summarized as follows [3]:
I. Transform f (k) to the wavelet domain and obtain
wavelet coefficients wj,k , with scales j =1 ~ J , and time
indices k =1~ N ;
2) Apply soft- or hard- thresholding to wj,k using
threshold = 2 ln( N ) and obtain processed wavelet
coefficients wj,k ;
3) Perform the inverse wavelet transform on , wj,k to
obtain the denoised signal f k .
B. Value of Thresholding
201
The key steps of signal denoising based on wavelet
transform are the threshold and shrinkage function
selection.If the thresholding is too low, noise will be
remained and if the thresholding is too high, useful signal
will be lost.The universal threshold, which is proposed by
D. L.Donoho[4], is the most popular in all kinds of
threshold. It can be expressed as follows:
= 2 ln( N )
Median( c )
=
0.6745
Where N is the sampling length of noisy signal, is
the standard deviation of zero-mean additive white
Gaussian noise(WGN) estimated by Donoho and Johnston.
c is the detail coefficients of wavelet transform.
C Thresholding Function
After several decades years development the
expressions of shrinkage function have lots of kinds. Such
as soft shrinkage function, hard shrinkage function [5], firm
shrinkage function[6], hyper-trim shrinkage function [7],
multi-parameter best basis thresholding shrinkage function
[8], Yasser shrinkage function [9]. All these thresholds and
shrinkage functions promoted the application of wavelets in
signal denoising extremely.the soft- and hard-thresholding
schemes are defined by [3]:
Hard-thresholding:
w j ,k , w j ,k
w j,k =
0, w j ,k <
(2)
Softthresholding:
sign( w j ,k )i( w j , k ), w j ,k
w j,k =
0, w j ,k <
(3)
Where sgn(*) is a sign function :
 1, n > 0 ( w j ,k )2
sgn(n) =
1, n < 0 = exp
k

k is positive number .
W
From (4),we know when wj,k , 0 ,

then wj,k = wj,k is a asymptote of the improved

function wj,k wj,k
,and overcomes the soft shrinkage
function's disadvantages;
(Hard thresholding )
When
W w j ,k 1
, , wj,k 0 ,

then wj,k is continuous at wj,k = ,and wj,k

(Soft thresholding)
The derivation of standard soft shrinkage function is
not continuous. The soft shrinkage estimates tend to have a
bigger bias, due to the shrinkage of large coefficients. Due
to the discontinuities of the shrinkage function, hard
shrinkage estimates tend to have a bigger variance and may
exhibit Gibbs phenomena in the neighborhood
discontinuities [10].In addition, its performance often
deteriorates substantially as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
of the input signal decreases.
To overcome the drawbacks of hard and soft threshold
function, a new threshold function was introduced to show
the advantage of non -negative dead zone thresholding
algorithm ,where wj,k is modified as:
makes the signal more smooth than hard thredhoding
function.
EXPREIMENT AND ANALYSIS :
In order to embody the advantages of the new wavelet
threshold denoising method more fully ,we select the
HeaviSine signal from MATLAB toolbox which is popular
library signal utilized in ,The length of test signal was,
respectively, N = 1024 and . The cubic spline wavelet was
chosen and the largest decomposition scale was J = 3. We
of used the median value method to estimate the standard
deviation of the noise
Median( c )
=
0.6745 ,
= 2 ln( N )
The test data is shown in table 1,and the Havisine
signal denoising contrast are shown in Figure 1.

1 2 sgn( w ) w + w , w
j ,k j ,k j ,k j ,k
=
w j ,k 0, w j ,k <

(4)
Where

202
Table 1. SNR results in dB for different denoising algorithms
From Table 1,it can be observed that the new algorithm
achieves higher SNR gains than the hard-thersholding,soft-
thresholding and compromise- thersholding methods.
Figure 1:Simulation example using Heavisine signal with different
denoising mehtods. (a)original signal ;(b)noisy signal with
203
SNR=11.8348db;(c)hardthresholdmethod;(d)softthresholdme
thod;(e)compromise method;(f)~(h)improved threshold
method with m=4,m=6,m=8.
from figure 1,we can find that the proposed
method obtains superior visual quality.
Conclusions
Although the standard wavelet threshold denoising
method is simple and practical, it does not work well for
signals with a low SNR; besides, it uses coordinate-wise
processing without taking the structural information of the
wavelet coefficients into account. Our new denoising
method based on wavelet transform and sparse
representation overcomes these problems. It is suitable for
many signals including those with a low SNR.
References
[1] Hu Chuihai, Liu Xuefei. Speech recognition for noisy conditions
based on discrete wavelet transform and parallel modelcombination,
icemi2005,Volume: 1, 408-411
[2] Donoho,D.L., Johnston,I.M.. Denoising by soft-
thresholding.IEEE Trans.Inf. Theoryl, 1995Vol.41,No. 3, pp.77-79.
[3] D.L. Donoho, De-noising by Soft-thresholding, IEEETrans.
Inform. Theory, Vol.41, No.3, 1995, pp.613~627
[4] Donoho, D.L., Johnston, I.M.,Ideal spatial adaptive via wavelet
shrinkage, Biometrika, vol.81, 1994, pp425455.
[5] Donoho, D.L., De-noising by soft-thresholding, IEEE Trans.
Inf.Theory vol.41 (3), 1995, pp613627.
[6] A.G. Bruce, H.-Y. Gao, WaveShrink with firm shrinkage,
Statistica Sinica Research Report, No. 7, 1997, pp. 855874.
[7] S. Poornachandra, N. Kumaravel, Hyper-trim shrinkage for
denoising of ECG signal, Digital Signal Processing vol.15, 2005, pp317
327.
[8] Adelino R., Ferreira da Silva, Wavelet denoising with
evolutionary algorithms, Digital Signal Processing, vol. 15, 2005, pp382
399.
[9] Yasser Ghanbari, Mohammad Reza Karami-Mollaei, A new
approach for speech enhancement based on the adaptive thresholding of
the wavelet packets, Speech Communication, vol. 48, 2006, pp927940.
[10] S. E. Kelly, Gibbs phenomenon for wavelets, Applied and
Computational Harmonic Analysis, Vol.3, No.1, 1996,pp.7281