A restoration method for confocal microscopy using complex wavelet transform

Confocal laser scanning microscopy is a powerful and increasingly popular technique for 3D imaging of biological specimens. However, the acquired images are degraded by blur from out-of-focus light and Poisson noise due to photon-limited detection. Several deconvolution and/or denoising methods have been proposed to reduce these degradations. Here, we propose a wavelet denoising method, which turns out to be very effective for 3D confocal images. To obtain a translation and rotation invariant algorithm, we have developed the 3D complex wavelet transform introduced by N. Kingsbury. These wavelets allow, moreover, a better directional selectivity of the wavelet coefficients. We show on simulated and real biological data the good performance of this algorithm.