Faculty Publications
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Item Nonlocal linear minimum mean square error methods for denoising MRI(Elsevier Ltd, 2015) Sudeep, P.V.; Ponnusamy, P.; Kesavadas, C.; Rajan, J.The presence of noise results in quality deterioration of magnetic resonance (MR) images and thus limits the visual inspection and influence the quantitative measurements from the data. In this work, an efficient two stage linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) method is proposed for the enhancement of magnitude MR images in which data in the presence of noise follows a Rician distribution. The conventional Rician LMMSE estimator determines a closed-form analytical solution to the aforementioned inverse problem. Even-though computationally efficient, this approach fails to take advantage of data redundancy in the 3D MR data and hence leads to a suboptimal filtering performance. Motivated by this observation, we put forward the concept of nonlocal implementation with LMMSE estimation method. To select appropriate samples for the nonlocal version of the LMMSE estimation, the similarity weights are computed using Euclidean distance between either the gray level values in the spatial domain or the coefficients in the transformed domain. Assuming that the signal dependent component of the noise is optimally suppressed by this filtering and the rest is a white and uncorrelated noise with the image, we adopt a second stage LMMSE filtering in the principal component analysis (PCA) domain to further enhance the image and the noise variance is adaptively adjusted. Experiments on both simulated and real data show that the proposed filters have excellent filtering performance over other state-of-the-art methods. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Item Enhancement and bias removal of optical coherence tomography images: An iterative approach with adaptive bilateral filtering(Elsevier Ltd, 2016) Sudeep, P.V.; Issac Niwas, S.; Ponnusamy, P.; Rajan, J.; Xiaojun, Y.; Wang, X.; Luo, Y.; Liu, L.Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has continually evolved and expanded as one of the most valuable routine tests in ophthalmology. However, noise (speckle) in the acquired images causes quality degradation of OCT images and makes it difficult to analyze the acquired images. In this paper, an iterative approach based on bilateral filtering is proposed for speckle reduction in multiframe OCT data. Gamma noise model is assumed for the observed OCT image. First, the adaptive version of the conventional bilateral filter is applied to enhance the multiframe OCT data and then the bias due to noise is reduced from each of the filtered frames. These unbiased filtered frames are then refined using an iterative approach. Finally, these refined frames are averaged to produce the denoised OCT image. Experimental results on phantom images and real OCT retinal images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd.Item Speckle reduction in medical ultrasound images using an unbiased non-local means method(Elsevier Ltd, 2016) Sudeep, P.V.; Ponnusamy, P.; Rajan, J.; Baradaran, H.; Saba, L.; Gupta, A.; Suri, J.S.Enhancement of ultrasound (US) images is required for proper visual inspection and further pre-processing since US images are generally corrupted with speckle. In this paper, a new approach based on non-local means (NLM) method is proposed to remove the speckle noise in the US images. Since the interpolated final Cartesian image produced from uncompressed ultrasound data contaminated with fully developed speckle can be represented by a Gamma distribution, a Gamma model is incorporated in the proposed denoising procedure. In addition, the scale and shape parameters of the Gamma distribution are estimated using the maximum likelihood (ML) method. Bias due to speckle noise is expressed using these parameters and is removed from the NLM filtered output. The experiments on phantom images and real 2D ultrasound datasets show that the proposed method outperforms other related well-accepted methods, both in terms of objective and subjective evaluations. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has a better performance in both speckle reduction and preservation of structural features. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Item An improved nonlocal maximum likelihood estimation method for denoising magnetic resonance images with spatially varying noise levels(Elsevier B.V., 2020) Sudeep, P.V.; Ponnusamy, P.; Kesavadas, C.; Rajan, J.Magnetic resonance images (MRI) reconstructed with parallel MRI (pMRI) techniques generally have spatially varying (non-stationary) noise levels. However, most of the existing MRI denoising methods rely on a stationary noise model and end with suboptimal results when applied to pMRI images. To address this problem, this paper proposes an improved nonlocal maximum likelihood (NLML) estimation method. In the proposed method, a noise map is computed with a robust noise estimator before the ML estimation of the underlying signal. Also, a similarity measure based on local frequency descriptors (LFD) is introduced to find the nonlocal samples for ML estimation. The experiments on simulated and real magnetic resonance (MR) data demonstrate that the proposed technique has superior filtering capabilities in terms of subjective and quantitative assessments when compared with other state-of-the-art methods. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.