On 1-Laplacian Elliptic Equations Modeling Magnetic Resonance Image Rician Denoising

Modeling magnitude magnetic resonance images (MRI) Rician denoising in a Bayesian or generalized Tikhonov framework using total variation (TV) leads naturally to the consideration of nonlinear elliptic equations. These involve the so called 1-Laplacian operator and special care is needed to properly formulate the problem. The Rician statistics of the data are introduced through a singular equation with a reaction term defined in terms of modified first-order Bessel functions. An existence theory is provided here together with other qualitative properties of the solutions. Remarkably, each positive global minimum of the associated functional is one of such solutions. Moreover, we directly solve this nonsmooth nonconvex minimization problem using a convergent Proximal Point Algorithm. Numerical results based on synthetic and real MRI demonstrate a better performance of the proposed method when compared to previous TV-based models for Rician denoising which regularize or convexify the problem. Finally, an application on real Diffusion Tensor Images, a strongly affected by Rician noise MRI modality, is presented and discussed.