Adaptive Thresholding Based Medical Image Denoising

Using Wavelets and Diffusion Filter

Research Proposal

Table of Contents
1.1

Introduction of Study........................................................................................................3

1.2

Research questions............................................................................................................3

1.3

Literature Review..............................................................................................................4

1.4

Research Methodology and System Domain....................................................................5

1.5

Time Chart........................................................................................................................7

1.6

Outcomes and significance of study.................................................................................8

1.7

References.........................................................................................................................9

1.1Introduction of Study
Image denoising has become an indispensable implementation in medical imaging especially the
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computer tomography (CT), and Ultrasound imaging. This
research work proposes a medical image denoising algorithm using an adaptive filter structure
for discrete wavelet transform. The presence of noise in biomedical images is a foremost
challenge in image computation and examining, noise removal techniques are intended for
eliminating noise or distortion from images while keeping the original quality of the image. This
research work is also going to apply a bank of digital filters which consist of median filter,
average filter and diffusion filter etc. to remove a range of noise not covered by wavelet domain.
This research will compare the efficiency of the wavelet-based thresholding technique at
different level in the presence of random noise and also examines the performance of
thresholding techniques for wavelet family in denoising of medical images, using validations
parameters.

1.2

Research questions

The research will aim to find answers to the following questions:

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What are the factors affecting medical images?

How these researches arise as an effective solution in future demands?
How to improvise the quality of medical images?
How to retain clinically significant information that is essential part of patient care, during

screening, in diagnostic stage and in the treatment phase?

How to achieve low computational complexity so that filtering operation is performed in a

short time?
What denoising strategies can be adopted to overcome such challenges because noise

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removal introduces artifacts and causes blurring to the images?

How to restore meaningful data from noisy environment in best possible way?
How to acquire a high resolution image with as much details as possible for sake of
diagnosis?

1.3

Literature Review

The image generally has noise which is not easily wiped out in image processing. According to
actual image characteristic, noise statistical property and frequency spectrum distribution rule,
3

people have innovated many methods to wipe out noises, which approximately are branched into
space and transformation fields. The space field is data operation proceed on the original image,
and perform the image grey value, like neighborhood average method, wiener filter, center value
filter and so on.
On the other hand, multi-scale methods apply the single scale method to sub-images
acquired by using wavelet decay or Laplacian pyramid. Lately, wavelet transform (WT) has been
generally used to restore signals from noisy medical image. In this way the wavelet
decomposition simplifies the statistic of the signal and attempts to discard the noise while retain
the signal characteristics. Another reason for opting the multi-scale decomposition is that it gives
information on how the amplitude part of the signal along different orientations differs with the
frequency.
Generally, In the method of denoising, the wavelet coefficients are passed through a
threshold testing that needs replacing noisy coefficients below a fixed value with zeros, and
carrying the others because they have the most of information. Then, the resulting coefficients
are used to reform the signal. This nonlinear process known as wavelet shrinkage depends rarely
on the choice of threshold value because it determines the efficacy of the whole denoising
operation. The threshold methods are particularly active for sparse illustration where most of
image information is centralized into some large coefficients. The another typical characteristic
of wavelet domain is the Sparsity where noise is constantly dispersed over all coefficients, on the
other side the signal is represented by a little subset of high coefficients.
In search methods and computer-aided diagnosis, the active progress in computerized
medical image reconstruction, and the related developments, has launched medical imaging into
one of the most important sub-fields in experimental imaging [3]. In Medical image processing,
the area of interest is being built. It involves a vast range of methods and techniques, inducting
with the addition of images by utilizing specialized devices, image improvement and analysis, to
3D model reformed from 2D images [10]. For operating segmentation and for obtaining
important information an image is captured, digitized and fixed in medical imaging [6]. Usually,
Medical images are of small variance and due to various addition they have a complicated type
of noise often, transmission storage and expo devices are also because of application of varied
types of quantization, reconstruction and enhancement algorithms [11].

The image processing techniques make it appropriate, to abstract meaningful information

from medical images [10]. The main motive of medical imaging is to get a high resolution image
with as much details as possible for the behalf of diagnosis [5]. To attain the excellent possible
study it is specified that the medical images must be clear, sharp, and free of noise and artifacts.
One of the major challenges in the study of medical imaging is noise elimination in these digital
images. Subsequently they could mask and dull important but sensitive features in the images, a
problem occurred in medical images due to the noise , many proposed denoising techniques have
their own problems [12]. Medical image processing and evaluating aims on three major research
fields such as Structural Imaging, Functional Imaging, and Molecular [8].
The aim of eliminating noise is achieved by reverse conversion, like wavelet transform
[1], [2]. Successful operation of wavelet conversion might lessen the noise effect or even reduce
it completely [3]. Continuous and discrete- are two main types of wavelet transform [2].
Computer programs mostly use the discrete wavelet transform due to their computers discrete
natures. From the computational point of view the discrete conversion is very efficient. In this
paper, we will mostly tackle with the modeling of the wavelet transform coefficients of natural
images and its application to the image denoising problem. The denoising of a natural image
debased by Gaussian noise is a classic problem in signal processing [4]. The wavelet conversion
has energy compaction property .So it is an important tool for this problem [5]. Indeed, wavelets
offers a structural form of sequence of signals which is known as approximation signals for
signal decomposition along with less resolution supplemented by a sequence of another touches
called details [6][7]. Denoising or estimation of functions, comprises reconstituting the signal as
well as possible on the basis of the considerations of a useful signal debased by noise elements
[8] [9] [10] [11]. All the methods based on wavelet representations have very simple algorithms
that are mostly more powerful and easy to work with than traditional methods of function
estimation [12]. It includes decomposing the observed signal into wavelets and using thresholds
to select the coefficients, from which a signal is synthesized [5].

1.4

Research Methodology

In the present research work, efforts are made to develop many efficient filtering schemes to
suppress speckle noise. It is necessary to overcome the noise power as much as possible and to
keep the fine details and the edges in the image as well real-time applications like television,
photo-phone, etc. Moreover to perform the refining operation in less time for online and realtime applications, it is very important to have very low computational complexity. . Thus, the
problem taken for this research work is Development of Efficient Adaptive Filter Structure
using Wavelet based thresholding to suppress Speckle noise for medical images. Since linear
filters dont perform well, nonlinear filtering schemes are adopted for achieving better
performance. The processing may be done in spatial-domain or in transform domain. Therefore,
the objective of this research work is to develop some novel spatial-domain and transformdomain digital image filters for efficient reduction of speckle noise from medical images.
Experiment can be extended:

Method can be use with different kind of medical image with different noise distribution.
Different noise can be considered in channel.
Different wavelets should consider in order to find out which wavelet in wavelet family

work well with problem area.

Shrinkage Functions should be use in order to improve results.
Higher versions of wavelet can be consider here.
Artificial intelligence may introduce in order to predict the noise level

This development will mainly concerned Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic

Resonance Imaging (MRI), the different digital radiological processes for vascular,
cardiovascular and contrast imaging, mammography, diagnostic ultrasound imaging, nuclear
medical imaging with Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) and Positron
Emission Tomography (PET).
Although our focus in this work will be on two-dimensional images, three-dimensional
(volume) images, time-varying two-dimensional images (movies), and time-varying threedimensional images are commonly used clinically as imaging modalities are becoming more
sophisticated.

System Domain
This Work use MATLAB software environment for the proposed work in medical image
denoising, MATLAB (matrix laboratory) is a numerical computing environment and fourthgeneration programming language. Developed by Math Works, MATLAB allows matrix
manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user

interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, and
FORTRAN.

1.5

Time Chart

The expected time to complete the research process is around 2.5 years that includes planning,
designing, and data collection, data analysis, concluding the findings and probing a further
question for research.
1st week

Main activities

Selection of topic
Composition
of

1-6

7th-10th

11th-

21st-

months

month

20thmonth

24thmonth

literature review
Research
methodology
Collection
primary

of

data
Findings
Conclusion

and

secondary data
Analysis
and
interpretation

25th month

of

and

Recommendation
Final submission of

the research

1.6

Outcomes and significance of study

This research will adopt a focused approach to critically evaluate effectiveness of proposed
denoising algorithm and we have to prove it better as compare with the exiting wavelet based
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approaches. The study will focus on various disadvantages of current system and focus on how
to optimize to effective and efficient system with respect to demand requirements.
Image denoising still remains a challenge for researchers due to noise removal
blurring of the images occured. This research acquires a methodology to overcome such a
problem giving an insight as to which algorithm should be used to find the most reliable estimate
of the original image data given its degraded version.

1.7

References

[1]

Donoho.D.L, Johnstone.I.M, Ideal spatial adaptation via wavelet shrinkage,

Biometrika,81,pp.425-455, 1994.
[2]

GaoZhing, Yu Xiaohai, Theory and application of MATLAB Wavelet analysis tools,

National defence industry publisher, Beijing,pp.108-116, 2004.

[3]

Aglika Gyaourova Undecimated wavelet transforms for image denoising, November 19,

2002.
[4]

Bart Goossens, Aleksandra Pizurica, and Wilfried Philips, Image Denoising Using

Mixtures of Projected Gaussian Scale Mixtures, IEEE Transactions On Image Processing, Vol.
18, No. 8, August 2009, Pp. 1689-1702
[5]

Michel Misiti, Yves Misiti, Georges Oppenheim, Jean-Michel Poggi, Wavelets and their

Applications, Published by ISTE 2007 UK.

[6]

C Sidney Burrus, Ramesh A Gopinath, and HaitaoGuo, Introduction to wavelet and

wavelet transforms, Prentice Hall1997.S. Mallat, A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing,

Academic, New York, second edition, 1999.
[7]

R. C. Gonzalez and R. Elwood, Digital Image Processing. Reading, MA: Addison-

Wesley, 1993.
[8]

M. Sonka,V. Hlavac, R. Boyle Image Processing , Analysis , And Machine Vision. Pp10-

210 & 646-670

[9]

Raghuveer M. Rao., A.S. Bopardikar Wavelet Transforms: Introduction to Theory and

Application Published by Addison-Wesley 2001 pp1-126

[10]

Arthur Jr Weeks, Fundamental of Electronic Image Processing PHI 2005.

[11]

Jaideva Goswami Andrew K. Chan, Fundamentals Of Wavelets Theory, Algorithms,

And Applications, John Wiley Sons

[12]

Donoho, D.L. and Johnstone, I.M. (1994) Ideal spatial adaptation via wavelet shrinkage.

Biometrika, 81, 425-455.