Wavelet Domain Bilateral Filtering with Subband Mixing for Magnetic Resonance Image Enhancement
Zeinab Adam Mustafa, Banazier A. Abrahim, Inas A. Yassine, Nourhan Mohamed Zayed, Yasser M. Kadah · Journal of Medical Imaging and Health Informatics · 2012
A method for magnetic resonance image denoising based on wavelet domain bilateral filtering (WDBF) is pro-posed. The main problem in bilateral filtering based methods is that the choice of filtration parameters has a trade-off between preserving edges and noise removal. In this work, a solution that would allow different com-ponents of the image to be filtered using different parameters is presented. The bilateral filtering is applied in a customized manner to different wavelet subbands and followed by subband mixing to form the final image. The proposed method is implemented to filter magnetic resonance images and verified both qualitatively and quan-titatively. Verification of the new method was carried out on synthetic as well as real data sets. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with present techniques indicate that the proposed method produces superior denois-ing results and suggesting potential for clinical application to boost the signal-to-noise ratio of low magnetic field scanners.