Comparison of PDE-Based Nonlinear Diffusion Approaches for Image Enhancement and Denoising in Optical Coherence Tomography
- 29 May 2007
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
- Vol. 26 (6), 761-771
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tmi.2006.887375
Abstract
A comparison between two nonlinear diffusion methods for denoising OCT images is performed. Specifically, we compare and contrast the performance of the traditional nonlinear Perona-Malik filter with a complex diffusion filter that has been recently introduced by Gilboa . The complex diffusion approach based on the generalization of the nonlinear scale space to the complex domain by combining the diffusion and the free Schrodinger equation is evaluated on synthetic images and also on representative OCT images at various noise levels. The performance improvement over the traditional nonlinear Perona-Malik filter is quantified in terms of noise suppression, image structural preservation and visual quality. An average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement of about 2.5 times and an average contrast to noise ratio (CNR) improvement of 49% was obtained while mean structure similarity (MSSIM) was practically not degraded after denoising. The nonlinear complex diffusion filtering can be applied with success to many OCT imaging applications. In summary, the numerical values of the image quality metrics along with the qualitative analysis results indicated the good feature preservation performance of the complex diffusion process, as desired for better diagnosis in medical imaging processingThis publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
- Automated detection of retinal layer structures on optical coherence tomography imagesOptics Express, 2005
- Image enhancement and denoising by complex diffusion processesIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2004
- Image Quality Assessment: From Error Visibility to Structural SimilarityIEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2004
- Speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography by frequency compoundingJournal of Biomedical Optics, 2003
- Speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography by “path length encoded” angular compoundingJournal of Biomedical Optics, 2003
- Speckle in Optical Coherence TomographyJournal of Biomedical Optics, 1999
- A novel multiscale nonlinear thresholding method for ultrasonic speckle suppressingIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 1999
- Efficient and reliable schemes for nonlinear diffusion filteringIEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 1998
- Image Processing through Reaction Combined with Nonlinear DiffusionMathematics of Computation, 1993
- Nonlinear image filtering with edge and corner enhancementIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 1992