Patent US 6,801,672

A color image is enhanced by removing noise. A wavelet transform is applied to a color image to generate sets of wavelet transform coefficients for multiple channels. Edge maps are produced for the channels from the sets of wavelet transform coefficients. An edge likelihood map is generated based on at least one edge map. The edge likelihood map is applied to the sets of wavelet transform coefficients to generate sets of filtered wavelet transform coefficients. A de-noised color image is reconstructed from the sets of filtered wavelet transform coefficients.