Improved DCT-Based Nonlocal Means Filter for MR Images Denoising.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine Volume 2012, Article ID 232685, 14 pages doi:10.1155/2012/232685 Research Article Improved DCT-Based Nonlocal Means Filter for MR Images Denoising Jinrong Hu,1, 2 Yifei Pu,1 Xi Wu,3 Yi Zhang,1 and Jiliu Zhou1 1 College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China 2 College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China 3 College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China Correspondence should be addressed to Jinrong Hu, dewhjr@ Received 21 August 2011; Revised 22 November 2011; Accepted 9 December 2011 Academic Editor: Quan Long Copyright © 2012 Jinrong Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The nonlocal means (NLM) filter has been proven to be an efficient feature-preserved denoising method and can be applied to remove noise in the magnetic resonance (MR) images. To suppress noise more efficiently, we present a novel NLM filter based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT). Instead of computing similarity weights using the gray level information directly, the proposed method calculates similarity weights in the DCT subspace of neighborhood. Due to promising characteristics of DCT, such as low data correlation and high energy compaction, the proposed filter is naturally endowed with more accurate estimation of weights thus enhances denoising effectively. The performance of the proposed filter is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively together with two other NLM filters, namely, the original NLM filter and the unbiased NLM (UNLM) filter. Exper