Adaptive spatial and wavelet multiscale products thresholding method for medical image denoising

Abstract

The denoising of medical images degraded by various types of noises is a major problem in medical image processing. A very good tradeoff between detail preservation and noise removal is obtained while implementing with various successive filtering procedures. This paper presents a wavelet-based multiscale products thresholding and spatial based Bilateral Filter scheme for noise removal of magnetic resonance images. In the first stage, the noisy image is passed through Bilateral Filter (BF) and some amount of noise is reduced but the image becomes blurred, hence adaptive wavelet thresholding is applied with multiscale product rule in the second stage. Rather than using Wavelet Transform, Dyadic Wavelet Transform is employed. After apply the Dyadic Wavelet Transform, wavelet interscale dependencies is exploited by multiply the adjacent wavelet subbands to preserve edge structures while suppressing noise. An adaptive threshold is calculated and implemented on the multiscale products rather than on the wavelet coefficients. Hence to identify important features like edges, curves and textures the thresholding is applied to multiscale products. The proposed method for medical image denoising is performed through a recursive application of simple steps and demonstrated on a number of standard medical images. The results obtained with the proposed method outperform other methods both visually and in terms of objective quality peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).