Total Variation Wavelet Thresholding

Tony F. Chan, Haomin Zhou

Abstract: We propose using Partial Differential Equation (PDE) techniques in wavelet based image processing to remove noise and reduce edge artifacts generated by wavelet thresholding. We employ a variational framework, in particular the minimization of total variation (TV), to select and modify the retained wavelet coefficients so that the reconstructed images have fewer oscillations near edges while noise is smoothed. Numerical experiments show that this approach improves the reconstructed image quality in wavelet compression and in denoising.