Noise reduction quality test for two-photon laser scanning microscopic images

Abstract

The two-photon laser scanning microscopic (TPLSM) image does not have an adequate quality test because it lacks a real ground truth image for comparing with the denoised image. The paper proposes an artificial test image to test the quality of denoising techniques. The image is generated as a modified Chessboard with simulated mixed Poison-Gauss noise, in which there are fields with three different shades. The possibilities of twelve state-of-the-art methods for noise reduction on the proposed quality test image and TPLSM image in publicly available databases were tested. Many methods are not able to distinguish between different fields of a Chessboard test image with a low signal-to-noise ratio. The instability of methods, that were not originally developed for the reduction of the Poison-Gaussian noise, was also confirmed in the proposed test image as well as the TPLSM images.