Combined compression and denoising of images using vector quantization

Compression of a noisy source is usually a two stage problem, involving the operations of estimation (denoising) and quantization. A survey of literature on this problem reveals that for the squared error distortion measure, the best possible compression strategy is to subject the noisy source to an optimal estimator followed by an optimal quantizer for the estimate. What we present in this paper is a simple but sub-optimal vector quantization (VQ) strategy that combines estimation and compression in one efficient step. The idea is to train a VQ on pairs of noisy and clean images. When presented with a noisy image, our VQ-based system estimates the noise variance and then performs joint denoising and compression. Simulations performed on images corrupted by additive, white, Gaussian noise ( AWGN) show significant denoising at various bit rates. Results also indicate that our system is robust enough to handle a wide range of noise variances, while designed for a particular noise variance.