Robust brain MRI denoising and segmentation using enhanced non‐local means algorithm

Image denoising is an integral component of many practical medical systems. Non‐local means (NLM) is an effective method for image denoising which exploits the inherent structural redundancy present in images. Improved adaptive non‐local means (IANLM) is an improved variant of classical NLM based on a robust threshold criterion. In this paper, we have proposed an enhanced non‐local means (ENLM) algorithm, for application to brain MRI, by introducing several extensions to the IANLM algorithm. First, a Rician bias correction method is applied for adapting the IANLM algorithm to Rician noise in MR images. Second, a selective median filtering procedure based on fuzzy c‐means algorithm is proposed as a postprocessing step, in order to further improve the quality of IANLM‐filtered image. Third, different parameters of the proposed ENLM algorithm are optimized for application to brain MR images. Different variants of the proposed algorithm have been presented in order to investigate the influence of the proposed modifications. The proposed variants have been validated on both T1‐weighted (T1‐w) and T2‐weighted (T2‐w) simulated and real brain MRI. Compared with other denoising methods, superior quantitative and qualitative denoising results have been obtained for the proposed algorithm. Additionally, the proposed algorithm has been applied to T2‐weighted brain MRI with multiple sclerosis lesion to show its superior capability of preserving pathologically significant information. Finally, impact of the proposed algorithm has been tested on segmentation of brain MRI. Quantitative and qualitative segmentation results verify that the proposed algorithm based segmentation is better compared with segmentation produced by other contemporary techniques.     

Image speckle noise denoising by a multi-layer fusion enhancement method based on block matching and 3D filtering

In order to improve speckle noise denoising of block matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) method, an image frequency-domain multi-layer fusion enhancement method (MLFE-BM3D) based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) has been proposed. The method designs an NSCT hard threshold denoising enhancement to preprocess the image, then uses fusion enhancement in NSCT domain to fuse the preliminary estimation results of images before and after the NSCT hard threshold denoising, finally, BM3D denoising is carried out with the fused image to obtain the final denoising result. Experiments on natural images and medical ultrasound images show that MLFE-BM3D method can achieve better visual effects than BM3D method, the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the denoised image is increased by 0.5?dB. The MLFE-BM3D method can improve the denoising effect of speckle noise in the texture region, and still maintain a good denoising effect in the smooth region of the image.     

Image Denoising with Adaptive Weighted Graph Filtering

Graph filtering, which is founded on the theory of graph signal processing, is proved as a useful tool for image denoising. Most graph filtering methods focus on learning an ideal lowpass filter to remove noise, where clean images are restored from noisy ones by retaining the image components in low graph frequency bands. However, this lowpass filter has limited ability to separate the low-frequency noise from clean images such that it makes the denoising procedure less effective. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive weighted graph filtering (AWGF) method to replace the design of traditional ideal lowpass filter. In detail, we reassess the existing low-rank denoising method with adaptive regularizer learning (ARLLR) from the view of graph filtering. A shrinkage approach subsequently is presented on the graph frequency domain, where the components of noisy image are adaptively decreased in each band by calculating their component significances. As a result, it makes the proposed graph filtering more explainable and suitable for denoising. Meanwhile, we demonstrate a graph filter under the constraint of subspace representation is employed in the ARLLR method. Therefore, ARLLR can be treated as a special form of graph filtering. It not only enriches the theory of graph filtering, but also builds a bridge from the low-rank methods to the graph filtering methods. In the experiments, we perform the AWGF method with a graph filter generated by the classical graph Laplacian matrix. The results show our method can achieve a comparable denoising performance with several state-of-the-art denoising methods.     

Guided Intra-Patch Smoothing Graph Filtering for Single-Image Denoising

Graph filtering is an important part of graph signal processing and a useful tool for image denoising. Existing graph filtering methods, such as adaptive weighted graph filtering (AWGF), focus on coefficient shrinkage strategies in a graph-frequency domain. However, they seldom consider the image attributes in their graph-filtering procedure. Consequently, the denoising performance of graph filtering is barely comparable with that of other state-of-the-art denoising methods. To fully exploit the image attributes, we propose a guided intra-patch smoothing AWGF (AWGF-GPS) method for single-image denoising. Unlike AWGF, which employs graph topology on patches, AWGF-GPS learns the topology of superpixels by introducing the pixel smoothing attribute of a patch. This operation forces the restored pixels to smoothly evolve in local areas, where both intra- and inter-patch relationships of the image are utilized during patch restoration. Meanwhile, a guided-patch regularizer is incorporated into AWGF-GPS. The guided patch is obtained in advance using a maximum-a-posteriori probability estimator. Because the guided patch is considered as a sketch of a denoised patch, AWGF-GPS can effectively supervise patch restoration during graph filtering to increase the reliability of the denoised patch. Experiments demonstrate that the AWGF-GPS method suitably rebuilds denoising images. It outperforms most state-of-the-art single-image denoising methods and is competitive with certain deep-learning methods. In particular, it has the advantage of managing images with significant noise.     

基于HSI颜色空间噪声检测的彩色图像去噪算法

目的为了有效去除彩色图像中的椒盐噪声,提高彩色图像质量。方法采用椒盐噪声检测和中值滤波相结合的方法,提出一种基于HSI颜色空间噪声检测的彩色图像去噪算法。将图像转换到HSI颜色空间,根据椒盐噪声在S通道具有极大值或极小值的特点判断出可疑椒盐噪声的位置,在H通道、I通道将可疑椒盐噪声分为噪声点和有用信号,对检测出的噪声像素进行中值滤波去噪。结果采用文中算法去噪后,验证图像主观评价值(Z)为1.30,平均PSNR为37.54,SSIM为0.99,Entropy为7.31,在主客观评价上优于现在常用算法。结论文中提出算法可以为彩色图像椒盐噪声的去噪提供理论基础,具有一定的实际应用价值。     

基于子带收敛因子阈值法的轮廓波消噪方法

提出了适用于轮廓波变换消噪中确定子带阈值收敛因子的样本噪声响应法.该方法根据标准高斯白噪声作用在每个子带上的统计特性,得到每个子带的收敛因子;使用该收敛因子对标准的3σ(或4σ)准则进行修正来确定不同尺度不同方向子带的硬阈值;并在轮廓波域进行子带硬阈值处理之后,使用自适应维纳滤波进行后处理.实验结果表明,本文提出的消噪方法,对含有高斯白噪声的图像进行消噪,无论在峰值信噪比方面还是在视觉效果方面均可以取得比较满意的消噪效果;在一定的范围内,采用较小的样本图像计算子带收敛因子,在加快消噪速度和减小内存需求量的同时,仍然可以保持满意的消噪结果.     

An adaptive method based on the improved LPA-ICI algorithm for MRI enhancement

Various diseases are diagnosed using medical imaging used for analysing internal anatomical structures. However, medical images are susceptible to noise introduced in both acquisition and transmission processes. We propose an adaptive data-driven image denoising algorithm based on an improvement of the intersection of confidence intervals (ICI), called relative ICI (RICI) algorithm. The 2D mask of the adaptive size and shape is calculated for each image pixel independently, and utilized in the design of the 2D local polynomial approximation (LPA) filters. Denoising performances, in terms of the PSNR, are compared to the original ICI-based method, as well as to the fixed sized filtering. The proposed adaptive RICI-based denoising outperformed the original ICI-based method by up to 1.32 dB, and the fixed size filtering by up to 6.48 dB. Furthermore, since the denoising of each image pixel is done locally and independently, the method is easy to parallelize.     

基于双边滤波的自适应彩色图像去噪研究

目的为了克服彩色图像去噪后存在的特征模糊,研究基于双边滤波的自适应彩色噪声图像去噪方法。方法使用二维离散小波变换(DWT)对含噪声的彩图图像进行近似分量、水平细节分量、垂直细节分量和对角细节分量等4个方向的分解。根据DWT各方向分量归一化后的方差比例,利用RBF神经网络构造双边滤波系数模型确定不同方向的最佳去噪系数,提出彩色噪声图像自适应去噪方法(DWT-ABF),并将该方法与常规方法作对比。结果在不同噪声类型以及混合噪声失真情况下文中方法都能有效地去除噪声,并同时保留图像细节信息,且与其他方法相比,文中方法去噪后的图像都具有更高的PSNR值。结论文中方法克服了传统双边滤波无法自行确定最佳参数的缺陷,同时也良好地解决了去噪图像特征模糊的问题。     

Denoising Medical Images Using Deep Learning in IoT Environment

Medical Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a noninvasive, nonradioactive, and meticulous diagnostic modality capability in the field of medical imaging. However, the efficiency of MR image reconstruction is affected by its bulky image sets and slow process implementation. Therefore, to obtain a high-quality reconstructed image we presented a sparse aware noise removal technique that uses convolution neural network (SANR_CNN) for eliminating noise and improving the MR image reconstruction quality. The proposed noise removal or denoising technique adopts a fast CNN architecture that aids in training larger datasets with improved quality, and SARN algorithm is used for building a dictionary learning technique for denoising large image datasets. The proposed SANR_CNN model also preserves the details and edges in the image during reconstruction. An experiment was conducted to analyze the performance of SANR_CNN in a few existing models in regard with peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and mean squared error (MSE). The proposed SANR_CNN model achieved higher PSNR, SSIM, and MSE efficiency than the other noise removal techniques. The proposed architecture also provides transmission of these denoised medical images through secured IoT architecture.     

基于SPIHT和视觉显著性检测的彩色图像水声信道传输

在学术和工程领域,如何在带宽严重受限的水声信道中获取具有一定可用性的彩色图像一直是一个备受关注的问题。文章提出了一种新的水下彩色图像传输方法,利用基于分级树集合分裂(Set Partitioning in HierarchicalTrees, SPIHT)算法的图像渐进传输和视觉显著性检测,在复杂多变、带宽严重受限的水声信道中获得可用性较好的水下彩色图像。该方法根据信噪比动态调整数据传输方案,并使用红色通道补偿来提高频域中显著性检测的准确性。然后使用 SPIHT 渐进传输图像,并在接收端通过导向滤波解决高降采样率引起的块效应,以获得高质量的水下图像。实验结果表明,所提出的方法在压缩水下彩色图像方面具有一定的适用性。     

Optimized contrast enhancement for tumor detection

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a real assistant for doctors. It provides rich information about anatomy of human body for precise diagnosis of a diseases or disorder. But it is quite challenging to extract relevant information from low contrast and poor quality MRI images. Poor visual interpretation is a hindrance in correct diagnosis of a disease. This creates a strong need for contrast enhancement of MRI images. Study of existing literature shows that conventional techniques focus on intensity histogram equalization. These techniques face the problems of over enhancement, noise and unwanted artifacts. Moreover, these are incapable to yield the maximum entropy and brightness preservation. Thus ineffective in diagnosis of a defect/disease such as tumor. This motivates the authors to propose the contrast enhancement model namely optimized double threshold weighted constrained histogram equalization. The model is a pipelined approach that incorporates Otsu's double threshold method, particle swarm optimized weighted constrained model, histogram equalization, adaptive gamma correction, and Wiener filtering. This algorithm preserves all essential information recorded in an image by automatically selecting an appropriate value of threshold for image segmentation. The proposed model is effective in detecting tumor from enhanced MRI images.     

The spatial statistics of structural magnetic resonance images: application to post-acquisition quality assessment of brain MRI images

This report describes a new quality evaluation method for structural magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the brain. Pixels in MRI images are regarded as regionalized random variables that exhibit distinct and organized geographic patterns. We extract geo-spatial local entropy features and build three separate Gaussian distributed quality models upon them using 250 brain MRI images of different subjects. The MRI images were provided by Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI). Image quality of a test image is predicted in a three-step process. In the first step, three separate geo-spatial feature vectors are extracted. The second step standardizes each quality model using corresponding geo-spatial feature vector extracted from the test image. The third step computes image quality by transforming the standardized score to probability. The proposed method was evaluated on images without perceived distortion and images degraded by different levels of motion blur and Rician noise as well as images with different configurations of bias fields. Based on the performance evaluation, our proposed method will be suitable for use in the field of clinical research where quality evaluation is required for the brain MRI images acquired from different MRI scanners and different clinical trial sites before they are fed into automated image processing and image analysis systems.     

Magnetic resonance image denoising using nonlocal maximum likelihood paradigm in DCT‐framework

The data acquired by magnetic resonance (MR) imaging system are inherently degraded by noise that has its origin in the thermal Brownian motion of electrons. Denoising can enhance the quality (by improving the SNR) of the acquired MR image, which is important for both visual analysis and other post processing operations. Recent works on maximum likelihood (ML) based denoising shows that ML methods are very effective in denoising MR images and has an edge over the other state‐of‐the‐art methods for MRI denoising. Among the ML based approaches, the Nonlocal maximum likelihood (NLML) method is commonly used. In the conventional NLML method, the samples for the ML estimation of the unknown true pixel are chosen in a nonlocal fashion based on the intensity similarity of the pixel neighborhoods. Euclidean distance is generally used to measure this similarity. It has been recently shown that computing similarity measure is more robust in discrete cosine transform (DCT) subspace, compared with Euclidean image subspace. Motivated by this observation, we integrated DCT into NLML to produce an improved MRI filtration process. Other than improving the SNR, the time complexity of the conventional NLML can also be significantly reduced through the proposed approach. On synthetic MR brain image, an average improvement of 5% in PSNR and 86%reduction in execution time is achieved with a search window size of 91 × 91 after incorporating the improvements in the existing NLML method. On an experimental kiwi fruit image an improvement of 10% in PSNR is achieved. We did experiments on both simulated and real data sets to validate and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 25, 256–264, 2015     

Poisson noise reduction from X-ray images by region classification and response median filtering

Medical imaging is perturbed with inherent noise such as speckle noise in ultrasound, Poisson noise in X-ray and Rician noise in MRI imaging. This paper focuses on X-ray image denoising problem. X-ray image quality could be improved by increasing dose value; however, this may result in cell death or similar kinds of issues. Therefore, image processing techniques are developed to minimise noise instead of increasing dose value for patient safety. In this paper, usage of modified Harris corner point detector to predict noisy pixels and responsive median filtering in spatial domain is proposed. Experimentation proved that the proposed work performs better than simple median filter and moving average (MA) filter. The results are very close to non-local means Poisson noise filter which is one of the current state-of-the-art methods. Benefits of the proposed work are simple noise prediction mechanism, good visual quality and less execution time.     

基于像素同龄组的航拍图像去噪方法

由于受到光照、机身震动等拍摄环境的影响,航拍图像中常常混有高斯噪声和脉冲噪声。针对这一现象,提出一种结合改进的中值滤波和维纳滤波的像素同龄组去噪算法。首先将图像根据像素值的不同,分为若干像素同龄组;然后根据每个同龄组的特点,有针对性地进行中值滤波或维纳滤波;最后,借助航拍绝缘子图像,完成仿真实验,并与单独中值滤波、维纳滤波的去噪效果进行对比。实验结果表明,该方法在处理混有高斯噪声和脉冲噪声的航拍图像方面,具有良好的去噪效果。     

MRI brain image enhancement using brightness preserving adaptive fuzzy histogram equalization

In this article, fuzzy logic based adaptive histogram equalization (AHE) is proposed to enhance the contrast of MRI brain image. Medical image plays an important role in monitoring patient's health condition and giving an effective diagnostic. Mostly, medical images suffer from different problems such as poor contrast and noise. So it is necessary to enhance the contrast and to remove the noise in order to improve the quality of a various medical images such as CT, X‐ray, MRI, and MAMOGRAM images. Fuzzy logic is a useful tool for handling the ambiguity or uncertainty. Brightness Preserving Adaptive Fuzzy Histogram Equalization technique is proposed to improve the contrast of MRI brain images by preserving brightness. Proposed method comprises of two stages. First, fuzzy logic is applied to an input image and then it's output is given to AHE technique. This process not only preserves the mean brightness and but also improves the contrast of an image. A huge number of highly MRI brain images are taken in the proposed method. Performance of the proposed method is compared with existing methods using the parameters namely entropy, feature similarity index, and contrast improvement index and the experimental results show that the proposed method overwhelms the previous existing methods.     

MAGNet融合导向滤波的真实图像去雾方法

为了提高单幅图像去雾方法的准确性以及适用范围,提出一种MAGNet融合导向滤波的真实图像去雾方法.首先,根据雾在真实图像中分布特性以及成像原理,设计多注意力残差密集块,从而有效提取真实图像中与雾相关的特征并降低梯度消失风险;其次,构造基于所设计的多注意力残差密集块的端到端卷积神经网络,实现对有雾图像中雾的去除;最后,将...     

Phase pattern denoising using a regularized cost function with complex-valued Markov random fields based on a discrete model

We present a simple and effective method for denoising phase patterns based on a discrete model. The proposed filtering method transforms the image denoising problem to solving the energy diffusion problem of a system with complex-valued fields. We establish an appropriate cost function that uses the discrete form of complex-valued Markov random fields. The attractiveness of the proposed filtering method includes three points: the first is that the filtering process can be easily implemented using an iterative method, the second is that 2π phase jumps are well preserved, and the third is its little computational effort. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulated and experimentally obtained phase patterns.     

Multi‐contrast MR image denoising for parallel imaging using multilayer perceptron

For clinical diagnosis in MRI, multiple examinations are commonly performed to acquire various contrast images. This article presents a learning‐based denoising method for parallel imaging to enhance the quality of multi‐contrast images so that the imaging time can be accelerated highly. Multi‐contrast images share structural information and coil geometry. The proposed method adopts the multilayer perceptron (MLP) model to save the sharable and redundant information among the multi‐contrast images. The images are divided into patches, which are used as the input and output of MLP. A geometry factor map is additionally used to provide noise amplification information of the accelerated MR images. Computer simulation demonstrates that the use of multi‐contrast images and geometry factor contributes to the quality of the reconstructed images. The proposed method reconstructs high‐quality images without impairing details from the subsampled intermediate images, and it shows better results than previous denoising methods.     

Rician noise removal in magnitude MRI images using efficient anisotropic diffusion filtering

In this article, a new methodology for denoising of Rician noise in Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) is presented. MRI imaging creates a distinctive view into the interior of a human body and has become an essential tool of clinical diagnosis. However, Rician noise is a type of artifact inherent to the acquisition process of the magnitude MRI image, making diagnosis difficult. We proposed a moment‐based Rician noise reduction technique in anisotropic diffusion filtering. We extend the work of the classical anisotropic diffusion filter and have customized it to remove Rician noise in the magnitude MRI image in 3D domain space. Our proposed scheme shows better results against various quality measures in terms of noise removal and edge preservation while retaining fine textures.