Directional Feature Preservation In

Medical Images Using Contour let

Transform.

By:
Mr.P.Karthikeyan
Assistant Professor/ECE
Velammal College of ENGG and Technology
Madurai-625009.

Introduction
Image

denoising has become essential in

medical image.
The Gaussian model is a reasonable
approximation for true noise distribution.
The Poisson model will describe the noise
introduced due to low-light acquisition
and also this model is a rough
approximation for multiplicative noise.

Points Obtained From Literature

Survey
Mohamed Ali HAMDIA Comparative Study in

Wavelets,Curvelets and Contourlets as

Denoising Biomedical Images published on
February 2012
Noise can be image dependent or
image independent.
Noise is also significant in MRI, CT and
US Medical Images.
Contourlet transform is an efficient
directional multiresolution expansion .
The performances of the three
transforms are compared in terms of Peak Signal to
Noise Ratio (PSNR) and the results are presented.

Dr. D. Manimegalai, D. Mary

sugantharathnamThe Curvelet Approach for
Denoising in various Imaging Modalities using
Different Shrinkage Rulespublished on
november
2011

Medical imaging system is very

complex and often noisy owing to the physical
mechanisms of the acquisition process.

In this paper Curvelet denoising techniques is applied to Natural images,

Satellite images and Medical images such as
Computed Tomography (CT) & Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Image De-noising is used to

produce good estimates of the original image

G. Landi, E.Loli Piccolomini An efficient method

for nonnegatively constrained Total Variationbased denoising of medical images corrupted by
Poisson noise published on July 2011.

In different medical
applications, such as Positron Emission Tomography,
microscopy, digital X-rays, where the acquisition
system uses photon-counting devices, the images are
mainly corrupted by noise of Poisson type.
When noise of Poisson
type corrupts the data the negative log of the Poisson
likelihood is the best objective function to minimize.
The numerical tests
produced both on simulated and real medical images
show the accuracy of the proposed model in removing
noise of Poisson type from the image.

Bei Li, DaShun QueMedical Images

Denoising Based on Total Variation
Algorithm "published on November 2011
Total Variation(TV)
algorithm is the hotspot in image restoration
field, and it used to deduce the image from the
observation to the original image.

Comparing with the

other traditional methods of image denoising,
total variation algorithm remove image noise.

Theoretical analysis
and experimental results show the TV algorithm
based on the partial differential equations is an
effective method of image denoising.

Problem Statement

Feature extraction and object recognition

from medical images acquired by various
imaging modalities are playing key roles
in diagnosing the various diseases.
These operation is difficult if the images
are corrupted with noise.
So the need for developing the efficient
algorithm for noise removal became an
important research area.

Proposed Method

The Proposed Methods are Contourlet Transform

(gaussian noise) and Total Variation method (poisson
noise).
The Contourlet transform addresses the problem by two
additional properties vizdirectionality and
anisotrophy.
The denoised image using contourlet transform out
performs both wavelet and curvelet visually and in
terms of PSNR.
Total Variation method is used to remove the poisson
noise without smoothing the image edges.

(a)Wavelet transforms have square

supports that suitably represent
point discontinuities.

(b)The contourlet transform,

representing multi-scaled
geometric analysis, contains
supports that are elongated and
that have multiple directions
along the contour.

Comparing wavelet transforms, the multiscaled geometric analysis contains multisets of orientational basis functions,
which can efficiently present a smoothly
curved contour with fewer coefficients.

Contourlet
The Contourlet Transform can be divided into
two main steps: Laplacian pyramid (LP)
decomposition and directional filter banks
(DFB).
Laplacian Pyramid (LP) is used to capture the
point discontinuities and then followed by a
Directional FilterBank.
Directional Filter Bank is used to link these
point discontinuities into linear structures.

The

Band Pass image from LP are fed into

DFB so that directional information can be
captured.

Then

the combined result is a double

iterated filter bank structure, named
pyramidal directional filter bank (PDFB) ,
which decomposes images into
directional subbands at multiple scales.

PDFB: Multiscale decomposition

a)Decomposition
b)Reconstruction Scheme

Algorithm
Perform

contourlet transform to the

noisy image, from the decomposition
process the coefficient are extracted.
Estimate the noise variance for each
noisy image pixel.
The threshold T for the contourlet
coefficients of noisy image is calculated.

Contd
If

the contourlet coefficient are greater

than the threshold,those coefficient are
remained unchanged.If they are
less,they are suppressed.
Then all the resultant coefficients are
reconstructed by applying inverse
contourlet transform,which results in
denoised image.

The table describes the PSNR value of

Wavelet and Contourlet Transform in
terms of dB.
NOISE

WAVELET

CONTOURLET

Gaussian noise

15.23

19.35

Salt and Pepper

8.31

13.20

Speckle

15.39

18.95

Total Variation Method

This method will denoise the image that

are not removed by contourlet
transform.
The Total Variation approach will remove
the Poisson noise present in flat regions
by simultaneously preserving the edges
in the medical images which are very
important in diagnostic stage.

Medical image corrupted by

Poisson Noise and denoised
Using Total Variation Method

Medical image corrupted by

Random Noise and denoised
Using Total Variation Method

Comparisons of PSNR value

The

denoised image using total variation

gives a PSNR of 16.3560 when the image
is corrupted with random noise
The denoised image using total variation
gives a PSNR of 21.0810 is obtained
when denoising the medical image
corrupted by Poisson noise.

Application
In

medical imaging, the need for

removal of noise is very important as
noise in the X-Rays ,MRI and other
medical problems may lead to
improper diagnosis of the problem.
Medical signal/image analysis (ECG,
CT, MRI etc.)

Reference
[1] Effectiveness of Contourlet vs
Wavelet Transform on Medical Image
Compression: a Comparative Study Negar
Riazifar, and Mehran Yazdi World Academy
of Science, Engineering and Technology 49
2009.
[2] Paul Suetens, Fundamentals of
Medical Imaging , 1st Edition, Cambridge
University, U.K., pp.145-182, 2002.

Contd
[3] M.N. Do and M. Vetterli, The
Contourlet Transform: an Efficient Directional
Multiresolution Image Representation, IEEE
Transactions on Image Processing, Vol.14,
No.12, pp.20912106, 2005.
[4] Nonlinear Total Variation Based
Noise Removal Algorithms L. Rudin, S. Osher,
E. Fatemi, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena,
Vol. 60, Issues 1-4, 1992

Contd.
[5] T. Le, R. Chartrand, and T. Asaki. A
Variational Approach to Constructing
Images Corrupted by Poisson Noise,"
JMIV, vol. 27(3), pp. 257-263, 2007.
[6] L.I. Rudin, S. Osher, and E.
Fatemi. Nonlinear total variation
based noise removal algorithms."
Physica D, vol. 60, p. 259-268, 1992.