Faculty Publications

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    Coupled PDE for Ultrasound Despeckling Using ENI Classification
    (Elsevier B.V., 2016) Soorajkumar, R.; Krishnakumar, P.; Girish, D.; Rajan, J.
    Speckle is a type of noise which is often present in ultrasound images. Speckle is formed due to constructive or destructive interference of ultrasound waves. Due to the granular pattern of speckle noise, it hides important details in ultrasound images. Many despeckling techniques are proposed in the literature, but most of them fail to reach a balance between the removal of speckle noise and preservation of the fine details in the image. In this work, an improved coupled PDE model is proposed which combines second order selective degenerate diffusion (SDD) model and fourth order PDE model based on the assumption that speckle in ultrasound image follows Gamma distribution. An edge noise interior (ENI) method is used to control the diffusion. With the help of ENI controlling function, the diffusion at edge pixels and noisy pixels are selectively accomplished with varying speed. Thus, the proposed model preserves the edges and fine texture details in the image. The model is tested on simulated images after corrupting the images with various levels of Gamma noise. Further, we have tested it on real ultrasound images also. The performance of the proposed model is compared with other similar techniques and the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, both in terms of qualitative and quantitative measures. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.
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    Fourth order PDE based ultrasound despeckling using ENI classification
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2016) Soorajkumar, R.; Krishna Kumar, P.; Girish, D.; Rajan, J.
    Medical ultrasound images are generally corrupted with a type of signal dependent noise called speckle. The major reason for the speckle in ultrasound images is the constructive or destructive interference of ultrasound waves. The granular pattern of the speckle noise degrades the image and hinders the information present in it. In this work, we developed an improved speckle denoising method using a fourth order partial differential equation (PDE) model by integrating Edge Noise Interior method in it. Edge Noise Interior (ENI) method preserves the edges and counts the number of homogeneous pixels in the neighbourhood to classify the edges. Furthermore, a maximum likelihood technique is used to estimate and remove the bias in the denoised images. The proposed method is compared against other existing methods and validated for both simulated as well as real ultrasound images. The proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of qualitative and quantitative analysis. © 2016 IEEE.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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 Ltd