Combined image compression and denoising using wavelets

This paper presents a novel scheme for simultaneous compression and denoising of images: WISDOW-Comp (Wavelet based Image and Signal Denoising via Overlapping Waves-Compression). It is based on the atomic representation of wavelet details employed in WISDOW for image denoising. However, atoms can be also used for achieving compression. In particular, the core of WISDOW-Comp consists of recovering wavelet details, i.e. atoms, by exploiting wavelet low frequency information. Therefore, just the approximation band and significance map of atoms absolute maxima have to be encoded and sent to the decoder for recovering a cleaner as well as compressed version of the image under study. Experimental results show that WISDOW-Comp, outperforms the state of the art of compression based denoisers in terms of both rate and distortion. Some technical devices will also be investigated for further improving its performances. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.