Model-based coupled denoising and segmentation of medical images
Ahmet Tüysüzoğlu, Paulo R. S. Mendonça, Dirk R. Padfield · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2012
We present a new model-based framework for coupled segmentation and de-noising of medical images. The segmentation and de-noising steps are coupled through a discrete formulation of the total variation de-noising problem in a restricted setting such that each pixel in the image has its de-noised intensity level selected from a drastically reduced set of intensities. By creating such a reduced set of intensity levels, in which each intensity level represent the intensity across a region to be segmented, the intensity value for each de-noised pixel will be forced to assume a value in this limited set; by associating all pixels with the same de-noised value as a single region, image segmentation is naturally achieved. We derive two formulations corresponding to two noise models: additive white Gaussian and multiplicative Rayleigh. We furthermore show that the proposed framework enables globally optimal foreground/background segmentation of images with Rayleigh distributed noise.