  Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE) was proposed by Stein for the
independent, identically distributed (iid) Gaussian model in order to derive
estimates that dominate least-squares (LS). In recent years, the SURE criterion
has been employed in a variety of denoising problems for choosing
regularization parameters that minimize an estimate of the mean-squared error
(MSE). However, its use has been limited to the iid case which precludes many
important applications. In this paper we begin by deriving a SURE counterpart
for general, not necessarily iid distributions from the exponential family.
This enables extending the SURE design technique to a much broader class of
problems. Based on this generalization we suggest a new method for choosing
regularization parameters in penalized LS estimators. We then demonstrate its
superior performance over the conventional generalized cross validation
approach and the discrepancy method in the context of image deblurring and
deconvolution. The SURE technique can also be used to design estimates without
predefining their structure. However, allowing for too many free parameters
impairs the performance of the resulting estimates. To address this inherent
tradeoff we propose a regularized SURE objective. Based on this design
criterion, we derive a wavelet denoising strategy that is similar in sprit to
the standard soft-threshold approach but can lead to improved MSE performance.
