Unbiased two-stage bilateral and non-local approach for MRI denoising

Abstract

Denoising of MR (Magnetic Resonance) images is one of the crucial tasks in the field of medicine as it is often corrupted by Rician noise which exhibits a signal dependent behaviour at different SNR. Due to the biased nature of Rician noise, it is a challenging task to attenuate Rician noise from MR images. In this paper, we analyse the basic and effective MRI denoising techniques. Also, we have proposed a two-stage denoising procedure which has a strong potential to remove Rician noise from MR images effectively. The efficacy of proposed two-stage MRI denoising method is analysed through qualitative and quantitative measures and it is observed that the performance of the proposed two-stage denoising procedure is superior to single-stage MRI denoising methods.