2019 IEEE 4th International Conference on Image, Vision and Computing
Image Denoising Using Graph-Based Frequency Domain Low-pass Filtering
Meijuan Liu
School of Information Science and Engineering
Shandong University
Qingdao, China
Abstract—Image denoising is always a very challenging task in
image processing, which requires appropriate signal priori to
regulate the problem. In recent years, the development of
spectrum theory and graph signal has given us a new direction.
By taking the image as a graph signal, we can construct a
suitable underlying image to make the image relatively smooth,
and combine the signal priori to image denoising. Based on this
idea, and combined with graph Laplacian matrix，a method of
image low-pass filtering in frequency domain is proposed in
this paper. Experiments show that the proposed method is
effective in image denoising, and superior to the traditional
Wiener filtering and Gaussian filtering.
Keywords-graph signal processing; graph spectrum; graph
filtering; image denoising
I. INTRODUCTION
Graphs are useful general data representations for
describing the geometric structure of data domains and are
used in many fields, including society, transportation,
sensors, images and neural networks [1-2]. In a large number
of raw data, the hidden relationship among the data can be
seen intuitively through graphical representation. Based on
the graphical representation, information can be effectively
extracted, which can be used for decision-making and action
planning. In fact, graph provides a very flexible model to
represent data in many fields, as well as a new framework for
the development of methods and tools for massive data set
analysis [1-5]. This new framework also provides a new
research direction for image processing. It treats the image as
a graph, thus graph signal processing methods such as graph
Fourier transform [3], graph spectrum representation [4],
graph filtering [5], can be used to process images. In [6], the
application of graph signal methods in images, including
image compression, image restoration, image filtering and
image segmentation were summarized, which have
significant gains compared with traditional image processing.
Graph signal processing has become a new direction of
image denoising. In [7], an adaptive edge-aware filtering
framework was proposed. It adaptively updates layer
similarity and Laplacian matrix, thus smooth images of each
layer can be obtained as input of the next layer. Using this
method, fine image details can be removed better compared
with the methods without the matrix update. However, it will
affect the clarity of edges and the computational complexity
is greatly increased. In [8], a bilateral filter for image
denoising was proposed, which did not require expensive
978-1-7281-2325-7/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
Ying Wei
School of Control Science and Engineering
Shandong University
Jinan, China
e-mail: eleweiy@sdu.edu.cn
diagonalization and iterative updating of Laplacian matrix,
therefore the computational complexity is greatly reduced
compared with the similar cascade mode in [7]. In [9], the
image filtering method was used to denoise and enhance the
color image adaptively. Before iterative sharpening filtering
using Laplace matrix, it performed sparse coding to remove
noise components. In [10], a joint denoising and contrast
enhancement framework was proposed without matrix
iteration. It used only one joint formula and displayed clearer
and better contrast-enhanced images than [8].
Except for the spatial domain method proposed in [8-10],
there are also frequency domain filtering and denoising
methods, but few of them are available. It transform the
image to frequency domain, then after processing, the
frequency domain signal [11-12] is transformed to the spatial
domain to get the restored image. In [10], the spectral design
of bilateral-like filters is proposed. Frequency domain
response formula is approximated by a Chebyshev
polynomial. This method did a better job of preserving
texture than bilateral filtering. In [1], it gave a case of graph
spectral filtering, which used low-pass filtering to filter the
frequency components of the image. Using this method,
there is no excessive smoothing of image edges compared
with Wiener filtering and Gaussian filtering. Both [1] and
[10] methods are low-pass filters in frequency domain.
Similarly, in this paper, graph-based low-pass filtering is
proposed, which can be flexibly adapted to different
applications. Using the weight matrix based on the pixel
value and combining the prior knowledge of the signal to
construct the model, the frequency domain filtering is
obtained. Then, the optimization of frequency domain
filtering improves the signal-to-noise ratio and quality of the
restored image.
The rest of the paper is arranged as follows. Section II is
the preparation of the proposed method, graph signal, graph
Fourier transform and graph frequency domain are
introduced. In Section III, the implementation and process of
the proposed image frequency domain low-pass filtering
methods are explained in detail. And experimental results
and analysis are given in Section IV. Finally, section V gives
a brief conclusion.
II. PRELIMINARIES
A. Graph Signal
Graph signal processing is to study, analyze and process
data sets with data element dependence, similarity, physical
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proximity or other attributes. Generally, using the weighted
graph G = V, E ,W  to express this relationship, and signals
reside on vertices of graph. Then V   v0 , v1 ...,vN -1 
represents the set of N |V |=N  nodes in the graph, E is a
set of edges, and W is the weight matrix, representing some
related attributes among adjacent data elements. If the edge
from vi to v j exists, the wi , j represents the weight of the edge,
which reflects the strength of the appropriate dependency or
similarity relationship between signals, otherwise wi , j is
equal to zero. The W is defined as
  ||  I i , I j  ||22    x  x 2 

exp    exp  
i j
 if ||  I , I  ||2  k
wi , j   2 l 2
  2 x 2 
   
 Considering the image polluted by Gaussian white noise
 0
 with zero-mean and standard deviation  n ,
where I i and xi represent the location and pixel-value of
pixel i in the image respectively,  l and  x are two
parameters of them. From (1), we can know that the smaller
the distance or pixel-value difference between two pixels, the
greater the corresponding weight, indicating that the
similarity or correlation is stronger. With the increase of
distance or of the pixel-value difference, the similarity or
correlation weakens. Therefore, the threshold can be defined,
it is no longer relevant if it exceeds threshold, which is
beneficial to image denoising.
B. Graph Fourier Transform and Frequency Domain
Given a graph signal, the weight matrix W can be
obtained by using (1) or its variant, and the matrix D is
N 1
defined as a diagonal matrix di ,i   wi , j . The unnormalized
j 0
graph Laplacian matrix is given by
L = D -W 
The object we want to deal with is the image of an
undirected structural graph, therefore Wi , j =W j ,i and L is a
real symmetric and semi-positive definite matrix. The
eigenvalues and corresponding orthogonal set of
eigenvectors of L are defined as l l 0,1,2,..., N 1 and
ul l 0,1,2,..., N 1 respectively. L can be eigendecomposed as
L = UΛU T 
where Λ=diag (l )l 0,1,2...N 1 and U  [ul ]l 0,1,2...N 1 . They are
understood as graph frequencies and corresponding graph
frequency components respectively. They define the graph
G = V, E ,W  spectrum together, and a large value l
corresponds to the high frequency component of graph. We
want the image to be as smooth as possible to concentrate
energy on the low frequencies and filter out the high
frequencies of noise pollution.
According to the graph Fourier transform, a graph signal
can be transformed to the frequency domain [1].
X = UT x  
Its inverse Fourier transform is given by
x = UX  
III. THE PROPOSED GRAPH-BASED FILTERING METHOD
Image denoising is to recover the original image as much
i j 2
 as possible from the noise-polluted or degraded image.
otherwise
y = x+n  
where x is the original image, n is the additive Gaussian
white noise, and y is the observed noise image. The
realization process of the proposed image denoising method
is given below.
A. Graph Signal Prior
If a graph signal is smooth, from the vertex domain, the
signal values near the I i should approximate to xi , which
can be expressed on the weight matrix. Weights are large
between similar signals. From the frequency domain, the
energy of the signal is mostly concentrated near the low
frequencies. This smoothness is quantified by a
regularization term of the form xT Lx , and the smaller it is,
the more smoother the graph is. According to the influence
of noise on high and low frequencies, large amplitude
attenuation of high frequency components and slight
 attenuation of low frequency components can obtain good
restored image. Based on signal prior information, the
problem of graph denoising can be expressed as the
optimization of the following formula [1].
x*  arg min 
x
 y-x 2
2 
  xT Lx ) 
where  is a smooth control parameter. (7) is a quadratic
function of x , we can obtain the reconstruction signal,

x*  ( I   L) -1 y
=U ( I   h( Λ)) -1 U T y 
=Uh ( Λ)U T y
where I is the identity matrix of the same order as L .
Alternatively, we can write (8) as,
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 Graph-Based Filtering ：Given a graph signal structure and assuming that the graph signal is relatively smooth, the
original signal x  0.47 0.41 0.43 0.30 0.44 has the same edge weight wi , j as one, and the spectrum can be
obtained by the implementation of the graph Fourier transform. Assuming that the noise pollution signal is
x1  0.68 0.41 0.47 0.40 -0.02 , after filtering in the frequency domain, we can get the recovery signal
x1*  0.4660 0.3980 0.3960 0.3600 0.3200 , which is similar to the original signal.
filter spectral graph
1.2
顶点
边
正信 号值 1
负信 号值
v0
0.8
e01
v1 e04 0.6
e14
e12 0.4

e24 v4
0.2
v2 e34
v3 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Figure 1. (a)graph signal(b) graph signal spectrum(c) noise graph signal spectrum(d) recovery graph signal spectrum

Graph-based filtering is based on the assumption that the signal is relatively smooth, that is, the spectrum of the
original signal is concentrated in the low frequencies, while the high frequency components are few. When there is noise
pollution, the high frequency components will increase. According to the different effects of noise on low and high
frequency components, the optimal recovery signal can be obtained by optimizing the frequency domain filtering
formula.

Box 1: Graph-Based Filtering

x*  h( L) y   The c is a variable close to one, which is obtained by

B. Frequency Filtering Formula
From (8) and (9), we can get a frequency response which
is considered to be low-pass filtering [1].
1
h(l ) 
1  l
If h( L) is a polynomial of order n about L , the
corresponding frequency domain response h (l ) is also a
polynomial of the same order [4]. Because of the different
regularization terms used in trade-off, the filtering formulas
obtained are also different [15], but they are all polynomials
about L .
For image denoising, with the increase of image
frequency l , the attenuation of high frequency components
is also increasing, which is good for image denoising.
Because the image is smooth, the noise is more obvious in
the high frequency part.
C. Optimization of Frequency Domain Filtering Formula
For further optimization of (9), we get
1 specific image, there can be a specific frequency domain
h (l ) 
c  l
further reducing the difference between the original image
and the noise image on the basis of the optimized  . Fine-
tuning the value of c, the attenuation of different frequency
bands of the image will be changed, so it can be designed to
meet different application requirements.
D. Properties of c
  For smoothing signals, the low-pass filtering formula is
used to restore the signal, and frequency response can be
given by (11), or as usual, it can be written as
1
h(l )   
c   h(l )
where h(l ) is a formula about l . In order to facilitate
understanding, we take h(l ) as  and  2 to explain the
attributes of c . Fig. 2 is the frequency domain response of
the proposed filtering method.
From the Fig. 2, we can see that the value of c affects
the low frequency component if the difference of the high
frequency response is very small, and it has more influence
on medium and high frequencies when the difference of low
frequency response is small. Generally speaking, for c  1 ,
more frequency assignments will be retained, for c  1 , more
frequency assignments will be attenuated. According to the
 
filtering design.

120
 image. The small MSE indicates that the restored image is
closer to the original image. SNR is the power ratio of signal
to noise. The smaller it is, the less noise it contains, and the
better the recovery effect. Table I shows the results of the
experiment.

(a) (b)
Figure 2. Frequency domain response of the proposed filtering method.(a)
Spectral response of h(l )  1/(c  l ) (b) Spectral response of
h(l )  1/(c  l 2 )

IV. DESIGN EXAMPLE

(a) (b)
Taking the 128 × 128 cameraman image as an example,
the additive Gaussian noise with zero-mean and standard
deviation of 0.1 is used to destroy it to get the noise signal.
Then, we construct the underlying image structure by
connecting each pixel to its horizontal, vertical and diagonal
neighbors, and set the weight between two adjacent pixels
according to the similarity. Using the variant of (1)

exp    i
  x  x 2 
j
 if | x  x | k
wi , j    2 x 2
 i j

   (c) (d)
 0 otherwise

where | xi  x j | represents the absolute value of the

difference between xi and x j , the weight matrix W only
determined by pixel value ignoring the influence of distance.
In (13), we take k  85 and  x  53 . Next, the proposed
filtering formula h(l )  1/(c  l ) is used to denoise.
Parameters c and  are set to 1.16 and 0.35, respectively.
For comparison, we use Wiener filter of size 5 × 5 and
Gaussian filter of size 15 × 15 with standard deviation of 1.5 (e) (f)
to denoise and restore. Fig. 3 shows comparison of four Figure 3. Comparison of image denoising results on cameraman image. (a)
methods of recovery effect. Original image (b)Noise image, SNR=12.90dB, Gaussian noise with zero-
For the recovery effect, using the mean square error mean and standard deviation of 0.1(c)results of Wiener filtering(d) results
of Gaussian filtering(e)results of the frequency domain filtering (f) results
(MSE) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as the performance of the proposed frequency domain filtering
indexes. There are defined as
N 1
1 TABLE I. IMAGE DENOISING PERFORMANCE COMPARISONS
MSE 
N
(x
i 0
i  yi )2 
Performance
Image Method
SNR (dB) MSE
Winener filtering 13.562 794.919
x
(i , j )
2
(i, j )
Gaussian filtering 13.325 829.623
SNR   camera
  y(i, j)  x(i, j)
2
man Frequency domain filtering 13.747 761.877
(i , j )
The proposed method 19.988 181.035
where N is the number of pixels in the image. MSE reflects
the difference between the restored image and the original

121
 From the visual quality of Fig. 3, we can see that the
proposed method has better overall restoration effect than
Wiener filtering and Gaussian filtering, retaining the main
feature structure of the image and smoothing moderately.
And because the geometric structure of graph is constructed
by Laplace of noise image, the edges of image are well
preserved. Table I is also shown numerically that the
proposed method has obvious benefits in image denoising
than Wiener filtering and Gaussian filtering.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, graph-based low-pass filtering is proposed.
It is based on graphical signals and uses prior knowledge to
obtain optimized filtering formulas in frequency domain.
This frequency domain filter can be used flexibly in different
applications. Compared with the general filtering formulas in
frequency domain, this method improves the signal-to-noise
ratio of restored images greatly. Experiments also show that
the performance of this method is better than Wiener
filtering and Gaussian filtering.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by Key Research and
Development Plan of Shandong Province (2018JHZ007).
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