Denoising 3D MR images by the enhanced non-local means filter for Rician noise

The non-local means (NLM) filter removes noise by calculating the weighted average of the pixels in the global area and shows superiority over existing local filter methods that only consider local neighbor pixels. This filter has been successfully extended from 2D images to 3D images and has been applied to denoising 3D magnetic resonance (MR) images. In this article, a novel filter based on the NLM filter is proposed to improve the denoising effect. Considering the characteristics of Rician noise in the MR images, denoising by the NLM filter is first performed on the squared magnitude images. Then, unbiased correcting is carried out to eliminate the biased deviation. When performing the NLM filter, the weight is calculated based on the Gaussian-filtered image to reduce the disturbance of the noise. The performance of this filter is evaluated by carrying out a qualitative and quantitative comparison of this method with three other filters, namely, the original NLM filter, the unbiased NLM (UNLM) filter and the Rician NLM (RNLM) filter. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed filter achieves better denoising performance over the other filters being compared.     

小波域高斯混合模型与中值滤波的混合图像去噪研究

基于高斯混合模型的小波去噪方法并结合中值滤波法对脉冲噪音有较好滤除效果的特点,将这两种方法结合起来,对含有高斯脉冲混合噪音图像进行去噪处理.该算法采用Matlab语言进行仿真.实验结果表明,这种混合去噪方法的效果要优于单纯使用中值滤波或者小波去噪的效果.     

A wavelet-based method for improving signal-to-noise ratio and contrast in MR images

Magnetic resonance (MR) images acquired with fast measurement often display poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast. With the advent of high temporal resolution imaging, there is a growing need to remove these noise artifacts. The noise in magnitude MR images is signal-dependent (Rician), whereas most de-noising algorithms assume additive Gaussian (white) noise. However, the Rician distribution only looks Gaussian at high SNR. Some recent work by Nowak employs a wavelet-based method for de-noising the square magnitude images, and explicitly takes into account the Rician nature of the noise distribution. In this article, we apply a wavelet de-noising algorithm directly to the complex image obtained as the Fourier transform of the raw k-space two-channel (real and imaginary) data. By retaining the complex image, we are able to de-noise not only magnitude images but also phase images. A multiscale (complex) wavelet-domain Wiener-type filter is derived. The algorithm preserves edges better when the Haar wavelet rather than smoother wavelets, such as those of Daubechies, are used. The algorithm was tested on a simulated image to which various levels of noise were added, on several EPI image sequences, each of different SNR, and on a pair of low SNR MR micro-images acquired using gradient echo and spin echo sequences. For the simulated data, the original image could be well recovered even for high values of noise (SNR approximately 0 dB), suggesting that the present algorithm may provide better recovery of the contrast than Nowak's method. The mean-square error, bias, and variance are computed for the simulated images. Over a range of amounts of added noise, the present method is shown to give smaller bias than when using a soft threshold, and smaller variance than a hard threshold; in general, it provides a better bias-variance balance than either hard or soft threshold methods. For the EPI (MR) images, contrast improvements of up to 8% (for SNR = 33 dB) were found. In general, the improvement in contrast was greater the lower the original SNR, for example, up to 50% contrast improvement for SNR of about 20 dB in micro-imaging. Applications of the algorithm to the segmentation of medical images, to micro-imaging and angiography (where the correct preservation of phase is important for flow encoding to be possible), as well as to de-noising time series of functional MR images, are discussed.     

3D MR image denoising using rough set and kernel PCA method

In this paper, we have presented a two stage method, using kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and rough set theory (RST), for denoising volumetric MRI data. A rough set theory (RST) based clustering technique has been used for voxel based processing. The method groups similar voxels (3D cubes) using class and edge information derived from noisy input. Each clusters thus formed now represented via basis vector. These vectors now projected into kernel space and PCA is performed in the feature space. This work is motivated by idea that under Rician noise MRI data may be non-linear and kernel mapping will help to define linear separator between these clusters/basis vectors thus used for image denoising. We have further investigated various kernels for Rician noise for different noise levels. The best kernel is then selected on the performance basis over PSNR and structure similarity (SSIM) measures. The work has been compared with state-of-the-art methods under various measures for synthetic and real databases.     

An MRI denoising method using image data redundancy and local SNR estimation

This paper presents an LMMSE-based method for the three-dimensional (3D) denoising of MR images assuming a Rician noise model. Conventionally, the LMMSE method estimates the noise-less signal values using the observed MR data samples within local neighborhoods. This is not an efficient procedure to deal with this issue while the 3D MR data intrinsically includes many similar samples that can be used to improve the estimation results. To overcome this problem, we model MR data as random fields and establish a principled way which is capable of choosing the samples not only from a local neighborhood but also from a large portion of the given data. To follow the similar samples within the MR data, an effective similarity measure based on the local statistical moments of images is presented. The parameters of the proposed filter are automatically chosen from the estimated local signal-to-noise ratio. To further enhance the denoising performance, a recursive version of the introduced approach is also addressed. The proposed filter is compared with related state-of-the-art filters using both synthetic and real MR datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposal in removing the noise and preserving the anatomical structures of MR images.     

Generalized total variation-based MRI Rician denoising model with spatially adaptive regularization parameters

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an outstanding medical imaging modality but the quality often suffers from noise pollution during image acquisition and transmission. The purpose of this study is to enhance image quality using feature-preserving denoising method. In current literature, most existing MRI denoising methods did not simultaneously take the global image prior and local image features into account. The denoising method proposed in this paper is implemented based on an assumption of spatially varying Rician noise map. A two-step wavelet-domain estimation method is developed to extract the noise map. Following a Bayesian modeling approach, a generalized total variation-based MRI denoising model is proposed based on global hyper-Laplacian prior and Rician noise assumption. The proposed model has the properties of backward diffusion in local normal directions and forward diffusion in local tangent directions. To further improve the denoising performance, a local variance estimator-based method is introduced to calculate the spatially adaptive regularization parameters related to local image features and spatially varying noise map. The main benefit of the proposed method is that it takes full advantage of the global MR image prior and local image features. Numerous experiments have been conducted on both synthetic and real MR data sets to compare our proposed model with some state-of-the-art denoising methods. The experimental results have demonstrated the superior performance of our proposed model in terms of quantitative and qualitative image quality evaluations.     

Bendlet Transform Based Adaptive Denoising Method for Microsection Images

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an important role in disease diagnosis. The noise that appears in MRI images is commonly governed by a Rician distribution. The bendlets system is a second-order shearlet transform with bent elements. Thus, the bendlets system is a powerful tool with which to represent images with curve contours, such as the brain MRI images, sparsely. By means of the characteristic of bendlets, an adaptive denoising method for microsection images with Rician noise is proposed. In this method, the curve contour and texture can be identified as low-frequency components, which is not the case with other methods, such as the wavelet, shearlet, and so on. It is well known that the Rician noise belongs to a high-frequency channel, so it can be easily removed without blurring the clarity of the contour. Compared with other algorithms, such as the shearlet transform, block matching 3D, bilateral filtering, and Wiener filtering, the values of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) obtained by the proposed method are better than those of other methods.     

MRI denoising using progressively distribution-based neural network

Magnetic Resonance (MR) images often suffer from noise pollution during image acquisition and transmission, which limits the accuracy of quantitative measurements from the data. Noise in magnitude MR images is usually governed by Rician distribution, due to the existence of uncorrelated Gaussian noise with zero-mean and equal variance in both the real and imaginary parts of the complex K-space data. Different from the existing MRI denoising methods that utilizing the spatial neighbor information around the pixels or patches, this work turns to capture the pixel-level distribution information by means of supervised network learning. A progressive network learning strategy is proposed via fitting the distribution of pixel-level and feature-level intensities. The proposed network consists of two residual blocks, one is used for fitting pixel domain without batch normalization layer and another one is applied for matching feature domain with batch normalization layer. Experimental results under synthetic, complex-valued and clinical MR brain images demonstrate great potential of the proposed network with substantially improved quantitative measures and visual inspections.     

一种混沌映射的相空间去噪方法

对于混沌映射来说,它们的频谱比混沌流的频谱更广阔,与噪声频谱的重叠率更高,所以混沌流的去噪方法对它们并不适用. 在半盲分析法的框架下,混沌系统的参数估计问题终将归结为最小二乘估计问题. 本文从最小二乘拟合的角度出发估计混沌映射的演化参数,进而通过相空间重构以及投影操作,实现对观测信号的噪声抑制. 实验结果表明,该算法的去噪效果优于扩展卡尔曼滤波器（extended Kalman filter,EKF）和无先导卡尔曼滤波器（unscneted Kalman filter,UKF）,并且能够较大程度地将信号源的混沌特征量还原. 关键词： 混沌 噪声抑制 相空间重构 投影     

基于小波变换的磁共振图像去噪

去噪是图像处理中的一个非常重要的问题. 传统去噪方法在降低噪声的同时会模糊图像的细节,基于小波变换的图像去噪方法能在降低图像噪声的同时较好地保持图像的细节,目前基于小波变换对图像进行去噪已经成为最有前途的去噪方法之一. 本文综合小波域去噪的文献,对小波域的磁共振图像去噪方法进行了综述,详细介绍了各种小波域的磁共振图像去噪方法,并对他们的性能进行了总结,对小波域去噪方法的发展趋势进行了展望.     

A weighted least squares algorithm for time-of-flight depth image denoising

In this paper, we present a new denoising method for the depth image of a time-of-flight (ToF) camera, based on weighted least squares (WLS) framework. The common method for ToF depth image denoising is to use bilateral filter. However, the ability of bilateral filter in edge preservation would be reduced while we attempt to smooth out larger spatial scale noise. In order to avoid this problem and preserve the edge information as much as possible, we introduce a new way to construct edge-preserving ToF depth image denoising based on WLS. We are to our knowledge the first to present a WLS-based method for ToF depth image denoising. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with bilateral filter, our proposed algorithm not only achieves better performance in edge preservation, but also improves the PSNR values of the denoised images by 0.5–2.6 dB.     

自适应中值-加权均值混合滤波器

为了去除图像中混入的脉冲噪声和高斯噪声,提出了一种基于自适应中值滤波和自适应加权均值滤波的混合滤波方法。该方法先将图像分为若干区域,并对每个区域进行噪声检测以实现两类噪声的分离,然后再分别采用自适应中值滤波和自适应加权均值滤波将分离出的脉冲噪声和高斯噪声去除。对这种新方法进行了计算机模拟实验。结果表明:新方法较前人提及的三种混合滤波方法具有更优的滤波性能,在有效抑制混合噪声的同时能很好地保护图像中的细节,为消除图像中的混合噪声提供了一种有效的途径。     

Color image edge detection method using VTV denoising and color difference

The traditional Canny edge uses Gaussian filter to suppress the noise, it also smoothes out the image edges. An improved Canny edge detection method for color image is proposed in this paper, the improved method uses fast vectorial total variation (VTV) minimization model to remove noise in color image, and then calculates the color difference and direction in CIELAB color space, which is used for non-maximal suppression. Finally, the improved method extracts the edges by the double-threshold method. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance than the traditional Canny edge detector. It can remove noise while preserving the image edges, and effectively detect the image edges.     

混沌信号自适应协同滤波去噪

混沌信号协同滤波去噪算法充分利用了混沌信号的自相似结构特征,具有良好的信噪比提升性能.针对该算法的滤波参数优化问题,考虑到最优滤波参数的选取受到信号特征、采样频率和噪声水平的影响,为提高该算法的自适应性使其更符合实际应用需求,基于排列熵提出一种滤波参数自动优化准则.依据不同噪声水平的混沌信号排列熵的不同,首先选取不同滤波参数对含噪混沌信号进行去噪,然后计算各滤波参数对应重构信号的排列熵,最后通过比较各重构信号的排列熵,选取排列熵最小的重构信号对应的滤波参数为最优滤波参数,实现滤波参数的优化.分析了不同信号特征、采样频率和噪声水平情况下滤波参数的选取规律.仿真结果表明,该参数优化准则能在不同条件下对滤波参数进行有效的自动最优化,提高了混沌信号协同滤波去噪算法的自适应性.     

Rician noise reduction in magnetic resonance images using adaptive non-local mean and guided image filtering

This paper proposes a Rician noise reduction method for magnetic resonance (MR) images. The proposed method is based on adaptive non-local mean and guided image filtering techniques. In the first phase, a guidance image is obtained from the noisy image through an adaptive non-local mean filter. Sobel operators are applied to compute the strength of edges which is further used to control the spread of the kernel in non-local mean filtering. In the second phase, the noisy and the guidance images are provided to the guided image filter as input to restore the noise-free image. The improved performance of the proposed method is investigated using the simulated and real data sets of MR images. Its performance is also compared with the previously proposed state-of-the art methods. Comparative analysis demonstrates the superiority of the proposed scheme over the existing approaches.     

PDE-based spatial smoothing: a practical demonstration of impacts on MRI brain extraction, tissue segmentation and registration

Spatial smoothing is typically used to denoise magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Gaussian smoothing kernels, associated with heat equations or isotropic diffusion (ISD), are widely adopted for this purpose because of their easy implementation and efficient computation, but despite these advantages, Gaussian smoothing kernels blur the edges, curvature and texture of images. To overcome these issues, researchers have proposed anisotropic diffusion (ASD) and non-local means [i.e., diffusion (NLD)] kernels. However, these new filtering paradigms are rarely applied to MRI analyses. In the current study, using real degraded MRI data, we demonstrated the effect of denoising using ISD, ASD and NLD kernels. Furthermore, we evaluated their impact on three common preprocessing steps of MRI data analysis: brain extraction, segmentation and registration. Results suggest that NLD-based spatial smoothing is most effective at improving the quality of MRI data preprocessing and thus should become the new standard method of smoothing in MRI data processing.     

一种快速稀疏分解图像去噪新方法*

提出了一种基于分层树型结构正交匹配追踪算法的快速图像去噪方法.通过选择高斯函数和墨西哥草帽小波母函数构建混合冗余字典,采用分层树状结构表示字典,结合构正交匹配追踪算法,实现图像稀疏表示,提高了图像表示的稀疏性,降低了算法的复杂度.依据噪音能量阈值,通过多次迭代达到图像去噪的目的.实验结果表明,在相同的噪音水平下,该迭代去噪算法取得了较高的较好的PSNR,获得更好的视觉效果.     

一种快速稀疏分解图像去噪新方法

提出了一种基于分层树型结构正交匹配追踪算法的快速图像去噪方法.通过选择高斯函数和墨西哥草帽小波母函数构建混合冗余字典,采用分层树状结构表示字典,结合构正交匹配追踪算法,实现图像稀疏表示,提高了图像表示的稀疏性,降低了算法的复杂度.依据噪音能量阈值,通过多次迭代达到图像去噪的目的.实验结果表明,在相同的噪音水平下,该迭代去噪算法取得了较高的较好的PSNR,获得更好的视觉效果.     

Effective noise estimation and filtering from correlated multiple-coil MR data

Modern magnetic resonance (MR) imaging protocols based on multiple-coil acquisitions have carried on a new attention to noise and signal statistical modeling, as long as most of the existing techniques for data processing are model based. In particular, nonaccelerated multiple-coil and GeneRalized Autocalibrated Partially Parallel Acquisitions (GRAPPA) have brought noncentral-χ (nc-χ) statistics into stake as a suitable substitute for traditional Rician distributions. However, this model is only valid when the signals received by each coil are roughly uncorrelated. The recent literature on this topic suggests that this is often not the case, so nc-χ statistics are in principle not adequate. Fortunately, such model can be adapted through the definition of a set of effective parameters, namely, an effective noise power (greater than the actual power of thermal noise in the Radio Frequency receiver) and an effective number of coils (smaller than the actual number of RF receiving coils in the system). The implications of these artifacts in practical algorithms have not been discussed elsewhere. In the present paper, we aim to study their actual impact and suggest practical rules to cope with them. We define the main noise parameters in this context, introducing a new expression for the effective variance of noise which is of capital importance for the two image processing problems studied: first, we propose a new method to estimate the effective variance of noise from the composite magnitude signal of MR data when correlations are assumed. Second, we adapt several model-based image denoising techniques to the correlated case using the noise estimation techniques proposed. We show, through a number of experiments with synthetic, phantom, and in vivo data, that neglecting the correlated nature of noise in multiple-coil systems implies important errors even in the simplest cases. At the same time, the proper statistical characterization of noise through effective parameters drives to improved accuracy (both qualitatively and quantitatively) for both of the problems studied.     

基于改进中值滤波和提升小波变换的阈值去噪方法研究

对于实际拍摄的一些图像信噪比低,噪声密度大,且含有混合噪声,而现有算法大多只能去除单一噪声的问题。针对混合噪声中含有的脉冲噪声和高斯噪声,提出基于改进中值滤波和提升小波变换去噪相结合的方法。去噪过程中,使用中值滤波器提取脉冲噪声并采用中值滤波算法滤波后,构造提升小波,采用改进阈值函数提升小波阈值去噪方法去除高斯噪声。实验结果表明,当噪声值(,)=(0.4, 20)时,采用本文去噪方法,峰值信噪比（PSNR）为34.002 1,平均绝对误差（MAE）为2.365 3。