Denoising of multicomponent images using wavelet least-squares estimators

In this paper, we study denoising of multicomponent images. The presented procedures are spatial wavelet-based denoising techniques, based on Bayesian leastsquares optimization procedures, using prior models for the wavelet coefficients that account for the correlations between the spectral bands. We analyze three mixture priors: Gaussian scale mixture models, Bernoulli-Gaussian mixture models and Laplacian mixture models. These three prior models are studied within the same framework of least-squares optimization. The presented procedures are compared to Gaussian prior model and single-band denoising procedures. We analyze the suppression of non-correlated as well as correlated white Gaussian noise on multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing data and Rician distributed noise on multiple images of within-modality magnetic resonance data. It is shown that a superior denoising performance is obtained when a) the interband covariances are fully accounted for and b) prior models are used that better approximate the marginal distributions of the wavelet coefficients.