Wavelet-based Rician noise removal for magnetic resonance imaging

  • Authors:
  • R. D. Nowak

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Rice Univ., Houston, TX

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

It is well known that magnetic resonance magnitude image data obey a Rician distribution. Unlike additive Gaussian noise, Rician “noise” is signal-dependent, and separating signal from noise is a difficult task. Rician noise is especially problematic in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes where it not only causes random fluctuations, but also introduces a signal-dependent bias to the data that reduces image contrast. This paper studies wavelet-domain filtering methods for Rician noise removal. We present a novel wavelet-domain filter that adapts to variations in both the signal and the noise