Confidence Based Anisotropic Filtering of Magnetic Resonance Images

Abstract

Image filtering is an important off-line image processing technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and/or contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of acquired images. The major drawback of filtering is that it often blurs the fine structures and object boundaries in the image along with noise. Anisotropic diffusive filtering techniques incorporate gradient information to blur homogeneous regions while preserving the boundaries and interesting structures. Unfortunately, their performance is limited in low contrast regions and around fuzzy boundaries. This paper introduces a multi-scale confidence based conductance function to address the limitations of anisotropic diffusive filtering. Experiments on phantom and magnetic resonance (MR) images have been performed using both our method and the gradient-based anisotropic diffusive filtering for comparison purposes.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 25, 2001
Accession Number
ADA411041

Entities

People

  • Christopher L. Wyatt
  • Ersin Bayram
  • Yaorong Ge

Organizations

  • Wake Forest University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Boundaries
  • Computer Science
  • Contrast
  • Diffusion
  • Distribution Functions
  • Filters
  • Filtration
  • Image Processing
  • Image Reconstruction
  • Iterations
  • Magnetic Resonance
  • Medical Engineering
  • Noise
  • Noise Reduction
  • Probability Distribution Functions
  • Probability Distributions

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Materials Science and Engineering.