Image Noise Reduction in Discrete Cosine Transform domain

Image noise reduction in the frequency domain by thresholding is simple, but quite effective. Wavelet domain thresholding has been an active area of research but relatively little work has been published on DCT domain denoising. A novel method for determining the hard threshold for the DCT domain denoising is proposed. The low amplitude DCT coefficients are discarded until the cumulative sum of the discarded signal energy is comparable to that of noise in each DCT block. Cycle spinning is also applied to reduce block artifacts. The proposed method is quite effective and simple enough to be used in portable devices.