MULTICOMPONENT MR IMAGE DENOISING USING NON LOCAL MEANS AND FILTERING ALGORITHMS

ABSTRACT Image denoising is a common pre-processing step in many Magnetic Resonance (MR) image processing and analysis tasks, such as segmentation, registration or parametric image synthesis. Many filtering methods use the signal averaging principle which is based on the natural spatial pattern redundancy in the images. However, they have the disadvantage of blurring edges due to the averaging of non similar patterns. In order to avoid this problem, many edge preserving filters have been proposed. The nonlocal means (NLM) filter, a new method, has emerged as a very simple and effective way to reduce noise while minimally affecting the original structures of the image. This method is based on the natural redundancy of patterns within the images. Recently improved, the NLM filter has been applied to the denoising of MR images and demonstrated better results than those of previous related methods. Also multi level filtering techniques have been implemented for enhancing the filtering process. Filters such as wiener filter, median filter and average filter are also applied to the MR image. Finally, it is worth noting that the application of the proposed method can clearly benefit not only visual diagnostics, but also quantitative methodologies that rely on good quality data, such as MRI brain tissue segmentation or MR diffusion tensor image processing.