Reduction of Edge Artifact in Adaptive Template Filtering

적응 템플릿 필터링에서의 Edge artifact 제거

Adaptive template filtering has been proposed recently for an enhancement of signal-to-noise ratio. In some magnetic resonance images whose gray levels have relatively small dynamic ranges, e.g., T1 imaging, however, artificial stair-like artifact is observed in edge regions. This is partially due to edge enhancement effect in such voxels that contain multiple compounds at the boundaries of tissues. The gray levels of these voxels tend to change those of near voxels that contain single compound by the adaptive filtering, which exaggerate edge discontinuities. In this paper, we propose a technique to eliminate such artifact by identifying those voxels and assigning a larger template for them. Filtered images with the proposed technique show substantial visual enhancement at the edges without degradation of peak signal-to-noise ratio compared to the original adaptive template filtering for both magnetic resonance images and phantom images