Poisson noise reduction from X-ray images by region classification and response median filtering

Abstract

Medical imaging is perturbed with inherent noise such as speckle noise in ultrasound, Poisson noise in X-ray and Rician noise in MRI imaging. This paper focuses on X-ray image denoising problem. X-ray image quality could be improved by increasing dose value; however, this may result in cell death or similar kinds of issues. Therefore, image processing techniques are developed to minimise noise instead of increasing dose value for patient safety. In this paper, usage of modified Harris corner point detector to predict noisy pixels and responsive median filtering in spatial domain is proposed. Experimentation proved that the proposed work performs better than simple median filter and moving average (MA) filter. The results are very close to non-local means Poisson noise filter which is one of the current state-of-the-art methods. Benefits of the proposed work are simple noise prediction mechanism, good visual quality and less execution time.