Terahertz digital holography image denoising using stationary wavelet transform

Abstract

Terahertz (THz) holography is a frontier technology in terahertz imaging field. However, reconstructed images of holograms are inherently affected by speckle noise, on account of the coherent nature of light scattering. Stationary wavelet transform (SWT) is an effective tool in speckle noise removal. In this paper, two algorithms for despeckling SAR images are implemented to THz images based on SWT, which are threshold estimation and smoothing operation respectively. Denoised images are then quantitatively assessed by speckle index. Experimental results show that the stationary wavelet transform has superior denoising performance and image detail preservation to discrete wavelet transform. In terms of the threshold estimation, high levels of decomposing are needed for better denoising result. The smoothing operation combined with stationary wavelet transform manifests the optimal denoising effect at single decomposition level, with 5×5 average filtering.