Faculty Publications
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Item A new non-local maximum likelihood estimation method for Rician noise reduction in magnetic resonance images using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test(Elsevier, 2014) Rajan, J.; den Dekker, A.J.; Sijbers, J.Denoising algorithms play an important role in the enhancement of magnetic resonance (MR) images. Effective denoising is vital for proper analysis and accurate quantitative measurements from MR images. Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation methods were proved to be very effective in denoising MR images. Among the ML based methods, the recently proposed non-local maximum likelihood (NLML) approach gained much attention. In the NLML method, the samples for the ML estimation of the true underlying intensity are selected in a non-local way based on the intensity similarity of the pixel neighborhoods. This similarity is generally measured using the Euclidean distance. A drawback of this approach is the usage of a fixed sample size for the ML estimation resulting in over- or under-smoothing. In this work, we propose an NLML estimation method for denoising MR images in which the samples are selected in an adaptive and statistically supported way using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) similarity test. The method has been tested both on simulated and real data, showing its effectiveness. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.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 Magnetic resonance image denoising using nonlocal maximum likelihood paradigm in DCT-framework(John Wiley and Sons Inc, 2015) Kumar, P.K.; Darshan, P.; Kumar, S.; Ravindra, R.; Rajan, J.; Saba, L.; Suri, J.S.The data acquired by magnetic resonance (MR) imaging system are inherently degraded by noise that has its origin in the thermal Brownian motion of electrons. Denoising can enhance the quality (by improving the SNR) of the acquired MR image, which is important for both visual analysis and other post processing operations. Recent works on maximum likelihood (ML) based denoising shows that ML methods are very effective in denoising MR images and has an edge over the other state-of-the-art methods for MRI denoising. Among the ML based approaches, the Nonlocal maximum likelihood (NLML) method is commonly used. In the conventional NLML method, the samples for the ML estimation of the unknown true pixel are chosen in a nonlocal fashion based on the intensity similarity of the pixel neighborhoods. Euclidean distance is generally used to measure this similarity. It has been recently shown that computing similarity measure is more robust in discrete cosine transform (DCT) subspace, compared with Euclidean image subspace. Motivated by this observation, we integrated DCT into NLML to produce an improved MRI filtration process. Other than improving the SNR, the time complexity of the conventional NLML can also be significantly reduced through the proposed approach. On synthetic MR brain image, an average improvement of 5% in PSNR and 86%reduction in execution time is achieved with a search window size of 91 × 91 after incorporating the improvements in the existing NLML method. On an experimental kiwi fruit image an improvement of 10% in PSNR is achieved. We did experiments on both simulated and real data sets to validate and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 25, 256-264, 2015 © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.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 A nonlocal maximum likelihood estimation method for enhancing magnetic resonance phase maps(Springer London, 2017) Sudeep, P.V.; Ponnusamy, P.; Kesavadas, C.; Sijbers, J.; den Dekker, A.J.; Rajan, J.A phase map can be obtained from the real and imaginary components of a complex valued magnetic resonance (MR) image. Many applications, such as MR phase velocity mapping and susceptibility mapping, make use of the information contained in the MR phase maps. Unfortunately, noise in the complex MR signal affects the measurement of parameters related to phase (e.g, the phase velocity). In this paper, we propose a nonlocal maximum likelihood (NLML) estimation method for enhancing phase maps. The proposed method estimates the true underlying phase map from a noisy MR phase map. Experiments on both simulated and real data sets indicate that the proposed NLML method has a better performance in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluations when compared to state-of-the-art methods. © 2016, Springer-Verlag London.Item Guided SAR image despeckling with probabilistic non local weights(Elsevier Ltd, 2017) Gokul, J.; Nair, M.S.; Rajan, J.SAR images are generally corrupted by granular disturbances called speckle, which makes visual analysis and detail extraction a difficult task. Non Local despeckling techniques with probabilistic similarity has been a recent trend in SAR despeckling. To achieve effective speckle suppression without compromising detail preservation, we propose an improvement for the existing Generalized Guided Filter with Bayesian Non-Local Means (GGF-BNLM) method. The proposed method (Guided SAR Image Despeckling with Probabilistic Non Local Weights) replaces parametric constants based on heuristics in GGF-BNLM method with dynamically derived values based on the image statistics for weight computation. Proposed changes make GGF-BNLM method adaptive and as a result, significant improvement is achieved in terms of performance. Experimental analysis on SAR images shows excellent speckle reduction without compromising feature preservation when compared to GGF-BNLM method. Results are also compared with other state-of-the-art and classic SAR depseckling techniques to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2017 Elsevier LtdItem Non-local means image denoising using shapiro-wilk similarity measure(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2018) Yamanappa, W.; Sudeep, P.V.; Sabu, M.K.; Rajan, J.Most of the real-time image acquisitions produce noisy measurements of the unknown true images. Image denoising is the post-acquisition technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the acquired images. Denoising is an essential pre-processing step for different image processing applications such as image segmentation, feature extraction, registration, and other quantitative measurements. Among different denoising methods proposed in the literature, the non-local means method is a preferred choice for images corrupted with an additive Gaussian noise. A conventional non-local means filter (CNLM) suppresses noise in a given image with minimum loss of structural information. In this paper, we propose modifications to the CNLM algorithm where the samples are selected statistically using Shapiro-Wilk test. The experiments on standard test images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2013 IEEE.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.