Enhancing Image Denoising Performance of Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition by Improving the Edge Effect

Bidimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) algorithm, with high adaptive ability, provides a suitable tool for the noisy image processing, and, however, the edge effect involved in its operation gives rise to a problem—how to obtain reliable decomposition results to effectively remove noises from the image. Accordingly, we propose an approach to deal with the edge effect caused by BEMD in the decomposition of an image signal and then to enhance its denoising performance. This approach includes two steps, in which the first one is an extrapolation operation through the regression model constructed by the support vector machine (SVM) method with high generalization ability, based on the information of the original signal, and the second is an expansion by the closed-end mirror expansion technique with respect to the extrema nearest to and beyond the edge of the data resulting from the first operation. Applications to remove the Gaussian white noise, salt and pepper noise, and random noise from the noisy images show that the edge effect of the BEMD can be improved effectively by the proposed approach to meet requirement of the reliable decomposition results. They also illustrate a good denoising effect of the BEMD by improving the edge effect on the basis of the proposed approach. Additionally, the denoised image preserves information details sufficiently and also enlarges the peak signal-to-noise ratio.