New Wavelet Domain Wiener Filter Based Denoising for Poisson Noise Removal in Low-Light Condition Digital Image (OTSU WIE-WATH)

Abstract

Digital imaging was developed as early as 1960s, largely to avoid the operational weaknesses of film cameras, for scientific and military missions. As digital technology became cheaper in later, digital images become very common and can simply captured using camera embedded in smartphone nowadays. Nevertheless, due to the limitation of camera technologies in low cost development, digital images are easily corrupted by various types of noise such as Salt and Pepper noise, Gaussian noise and Poisson noise. For digital image captured in the photon limited low light condition, the effect of image noise especially Poisson noise will be more obvious, degrading the quality of the image. Thus, this study aims to develop new denoising technique for Poisson noise removal in low light condition digital images. This study proposed a method which is referred to the OTSU WIE-WATH Filter which utilizes Otsu Threshold, Wiener Filter and Wavelet Threshold. This filter is designed for low and medium Poisson noise removal. The proposed filter performance is compared with other existing denoising techniques. These filters performances are analyzed with two evaluation methods which are objective method and subjective method. Objective method includes performance analysis in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Squared Error (MSE). On the other hand, subjective method used is visual effect inspection. The results show that proposed OTSU WIE-WATH Filter provide better performance than compared denoising techniques in low and medium levels Poisson noise removal while preserving the edges and fine details of noisy images.