Wavelets in Medical Image Processing: De-noising, Segmentation, and Registration

Wavelet transforms and other multi-scale analysis functions have been used for compact signal and image representations in de-noising, compression and feature detection processing problems for about twenty years. Numerous research works have proven that space-frequency and spacescale expansions with this family of analysis functions provided a very efficient framework for signal or image data. The wavelet transform itself offers great design flexibility. Basis selection, spatial-frequency tiling, and various wavelet threshold strategies can be optimized for best adaptation to a processing application, data characteristics and feature of interest. Fast implementation of wavelet transforms using a filter-bank framework enable real time processing capability. Instead of trying to replace standard image processing techniques, wavelet transforms offer an efficient representation of the signal, finely tuned to its intrinsic properties. By combining such representations with simple processing techniques in the transform domain, multi-scale analysis can accomplish remarkable performance and efficiency for many image processing problems.