Performance Evaluation of Gabor Filter in Removing Rician Noise in MR Images

Magnetic Resonance images are contaminated by Rician distributed noise due to the presence of contrast-diminishing signal-dependent bias. In this paper, Gabor filter approach for bias removal in MR images is attempted. The filter was tested in four different brain MR images and the results obtained were compared qualitatively and quantitatively with the other four established filtering techniques. This study exhibits that the Gabor bias removal technique improved the contrast of the MR image that is found from the moderate increase in PSNR value and visual inspection by trained radiologist.

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