Weighted Schatten p-norm minimization for 3D magnetic resonance images denoising

Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and scientific research. A clean MR image can better provide patient's information to doctors or researchers for further treatment. However, in real life, MR images are inevitably corrupted by annoying Rician noise in the process of imaging. Aiming at the Rician noise of 3D MR images, a framework is proposed to suppress noise by low-rank matrix approximation (LRMA) with weighted Schatten p-norm minimization regularization (WSNMD-3D). The proposed method not only considers the importance of different rank components, but can also approximate the true rank of the latent low-rank matrix. This approach first groups similar non-local cubic patches extracted from the noisy 3D MR image into a matrix whose columns are vectorized patches. The above matrix can be modeled as a low-rank matrix approximate model. Then weighted Schatten p-norm minimization (WSNM) is applied to the model, which shrinks different rank components with different treatments. Finally, the denoised 3D MR image is acquired by aggregating all denoised patches with weighted averaging. Experimental results on synthetic and real 3D MR data show that the proposed method obtains better results than state-of-the-art methods, both visually and quantitatively.