Medical Image Deblurring via Lagrangian Pursuit in Frame Dictionaries

Medical image deblurring attempts to recover the original human organ boundaries prior to degradation by an optical imaging system, e.g. MRI, CT or Ultrasound. In this paper, we aim to achieve deblurring by the non-linear approximation of medical images in a well chosen basis. The proposed method decomposes medical images over elementary waveforms chosen in a redundant dictionary composed of Morlet and Curvelet frames, which are highly suitable for curved edges. It is well known that finding an ideal sparse transform adapted to all medical images is hopeless. As the dictionary is redundant, we proceed by using a Lagrangian pursuit in order to find the optimal set of the dictionary vectors which represent the few coefficients that contain the information we are looking for and give a robust geometric image description. The proposed method in most instances outperforms, common deblurring methods using translation invariant Wavelet, Tikhonov and TV regularization algorithms.

[1]  Ming Jiang,et al.  Blind deblurring of spiral CT images , 2003, Conference Record of Thirty-Fifth Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (Cat.No.01CH37256).

[2]  Jean-Michel Morel,et al.  A non-local algorithm for image denoising , 2005, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05).

[3]  J. Pesquet,et al.  On the Statistics of Best Bases Criteria , 1995 .

[4]  Martin J. Wainwright,et al.  Image denoising using scale mixtures of Gaussians in the wavelet domain , 2003, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[5]  Ashish Khare,et al.  Soft-Thresholding for Denoising of Medical Images - a Multiresolution Approach , 2005, Int. J. Wavelets Multiresolution Inf. Process..

[6]  Oleg V. Michailovich,et al.  Phase unwrapping for 2-D blind deconvolution of ultrasound images , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[7]  Stéphane Mallat,et al.  On denoising and best signal representation , 1999, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[8]  Alfio Quarteroni,et al.  Scientific Computing with MATLAB and Octave , 2006 .

[9]  Jing Lin,et al.  Feature Extraction Based on Morlet Wavelet and its Application for Mechanical Fault Diagnosis , 2000 .

[10]  A. Grossmann,et al.  Cycle-octave and related transforms in seismic signal analysis , 1984 .

[11]  Stéphane Mallat,et al.  Matching pursuits with time-frequency dictionaries , 1993, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..

[12]  Emmanuel J. Candès,et al.  Near-Optimal Signal Recovery From Random Projections: Universal Encoding Strategies? , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[13]  David L Donoho,et al.  Compressed sensing , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[14]  Torfinn Taxt,et al.  Comparison of cepstrum based methods for radial blind deconvolution of ultrasound images , 1996, Proceedings Ninth IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems.

[15]  E. Candès,et al.  Curvelets: A Surprisingly Effective Nonadaptive Representation for Objects with Edges , 2000 .

[16]  Tony F. Chan,et al.  Image processing and analysis - variational, PDE, wavelet, and stochastic methods , 2005 .

[17]  Michael A. Saunders,et al.  Atomic Decomposition by Basis Pursuit , 1998, SIAM J. Sci. Comput..

[18]  Shuxing Chen,et al.  Stability of transonic shock fronts in two-dimensional Euler systems , 2004 .

[19]  Richard Kronland-Martinet,et al.  Asymptotic wavelet and Gabor analysis: Extraction of instantaneous frequencies , 1992, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[20]  T. Chan,et al.  Variational image inpainting , 2005 .

[21]  E. Candès,et al.  New tight frames of curvelets and optimal representations of objects with piecewise C2 singularities , 2004 .

[22]  S. Mallat A wavelet tour of signal processing , 1998 .

[23]  R. Gribonval,et al.  Tight wavelet frames in Lebesgue and Sobolev spaces , 2004 .

[24]  Ronald R. Coifman,et al.  Entropy-based algorithms for best basis selection , 1992, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.