Title: Fast gradient projection algorithm based Rician noise removal in MR images

Authors: Jayabal Papitha; Damodaran Nedumaran

Addresses: Central Instrumentation and Service Laboratory, University of Madras, Guindy Campus, Chennai 600 0025, Tamilnadu, India ' Central Instrumentation and Service Laboratory, University of Madras, Guindy Campus, Chennai 600 0025, Tamilnadu, India

Abstract: MR images are vulnerable to Rician distributed noise due to contrast reducing signal dependent bias. This paper presents a combined gradient projection method with Gabor filter technique for removing the Rician noise present in MR images. The proposed method is based on the function of Gradient projection filter to identify the artefact and denoise the image. For demonstrating the performance of the proposed method, the Rician noise is added to the raw MR images and removed using the proposed method. Further, the proposed algorithm was tested on various brain MR images and the performance of the algorithm was studied by estimating the performance metrics and visual inspection, and compared with the existing denoising methods.

Keywords: fast gradient projection; Rician noise; total variation; Gabor filter; MRI; magnetic resonance imaging; PSNR; peak signal to noise ratio; noise removal; medical images; brain images.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBET.2013.057678

International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2013 Vol.12 No.4, pp.399 - 417

Received: 16 Jul 2013
Accepted: 07 Oct 2013
Published online: 27 Sep 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article