• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.2
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• pp.439-443
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• 2019

To improve the noise characteristics, software-based noise reduction algorithms are widely used in cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) pixelated semiconductor gamma camera system. The purpose of this study was to develop an improved median filtering algorithm using a thresholding method for noise reduction in a CZT pixelated semiconductor gamma camera system. The gamma camera system simulated is a CZT pixelated semiconductor detector with a pixel-matched parallel-hole collimator and the spatial resolution phatnom was designed with the Geant4 Application for Tomography Emission (GATE). In addition, a noise reduction algorithm with a median filter using an improved thresholding method is developed and we applied our proposed algorithm to an acquired spatial resolution phantom image. According to the results, the proposed median filter improved the noise characteristics compared to a conventional median filter. In particular, the average for normalized noise power spectrum, contrast to noise ratio, and coefficient of variation results using the proposed median filter were 10, 1.11, and 1.19 times better than results using conventional median filter, respectively. In conclusion, our results show that the proposed median filter using improved the thresholding method results in high imaging performance when applied in a CZT semiconductor gamma camera system.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.151-165
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• 2010

Images are often corrupted by impulse noise due to a noise sensor or channel transmission errors. The filter based on SVM(Support Vector Machine) and the improved adaptive median filtering is proposed to preserve image details while suppressing impulse noise for image restoration. Our approach uses an SVM impulse detector to judge whether the input pixel is noise. If a pixel is detected as a noisy pixel, the improved adaptive median filter is used to replace it. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed filter, extensive simulation experiments have been conducted under both salt-and-pepper and random-valued impulse noise models to compare our method with many other well known filters in the qualitative measure and quantitative measures such as PSNR and MAE. Experimental results indicate that the proposed filter performs significantly better than many other existing filters.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.222-228
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• 2023

This study aimed to analyze the applicability of the improved median filter in positron emission tomography (PET)/magnetic resonance (MR) fusion images based on parallel imaging using generalized autocalibrating partially parallel acquisition (GRAPPA). In this study, a PET/MR fusion imaging system based on a 3.0T magnetic field and ¹⁸F radioisotope were used. An improved median filter that can set a mask of the median value more efficiently than before was modeled and applied to the acquired image. As quantitative evaluation parameters of the noise level, the contrast to noise ratio (CNR) and coefficient of variation (COV) were calculated. Additionally, no-reference-based evaluation parameters were used to analyze the overall image quality. We confirmed that the CNR and COV values of the PET/MR fusion images to which the improved median filter was applied improved by approximately 3.32 and 2.19 times on average, respectively, compared to the noisy image. In addition, the no-reference-based evaluation results showed a similar trend for the noise-level results. In conclusion, we demonstrated that it can be supplemented by using an improved median filter, which suggests the problem of image quality degradation of PET/MR fusion images that shortens scan time using GRAPPA.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.9
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• pp.3380-3389
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• 2022

We evaluated the performance of an improved hybrid median filter (IHMF) applied to X-ray computed tomography (CT) images obtained using a high-resolution photon-counting cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) detector. To study how the proposed approach improves the image quality, we measured the noise levels and the overall CT-image quality. We established a CZT imaging system with a detector length of 5.12 cm and thickness of 0.3 cm and acquired phantom images. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed filter, we first modeled two conventional median filters. Subsequently, we were able to achieve a normalized noise power spectrum result of ~10^-8 mm², and furthermore, the proposed method improved the contrast-to-noise ratio by a factor of ~1.51 and the coefficient of variation by 1.55 relative to the counterpart values of the no-filter image. In addition, the IHMF exhibited the best performance among the three filters considered as regards the peak signal-to-noise ratio and no-reference-based image-quality evaluation parameters. Thus, our results demonstrate that the IHMF approach provides a superior image performance over conventional median filtering methods when applied to actual CZT X-ray CT images.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.10
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• pp.1671-1677
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a machine learning method for random noise removal in image deblurring. The proposed method uses a logistic regression to select reliable data to use them, and, at the same time, to exclude data, which seem to be corrupted by random noise, in the deblurring process. The proposed method uses commonly available images as training data. Simulation results show an improved performance of the proposed method, as compared with the median filtering based reliable data selection method.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.941-947
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• 2018

Since the amplitudes of spin echo train in nuclear magnetic resonance logging (NMRL) are small and the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is also very low, this paper puts forward an improved de-noising algorithm based on wavelet transformation. The steps of this improved algorithm are designed and realized based on the characteristics of spin echo train in NMRL. To test this improved de-noising algorithm, a 32 points forward model of big porosity is build, the signal of spin echo sequence with adjustable SNR are generated by this forward model in an experiment, then the median filtering, wavelet hard threshold de-noising, wavelet soft threshold de-noising and the improved de-noising algorithm are compared to de-noising these signals, the filtering effects of these four algorithms are analyzed while the SNR and the root mean square error (RMSE) are also calculated out. The results of this experiment show that the improved de-noising algorithm can improve SNR from 10 to 27.57, which is very useful to enhance signal and de-nosing noise for spin echo train in NMRL.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.417-426
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• 2023

To improve the effect of image restoration and solve the image detail loss, an image dehazing enhancement algorithm based on mean guided filtering is proposed. The superpixel calculation method is used to pre-segment the original foggy image to obtain different sub-regions. The Ncut algorithm is used to segment the original image, and it outputs the segmented image until there is no more region merging in the image. By means of the mean-guided filtering method, the minimum value is selected as the value of the current pixel point in the local small block of the dark image, and the dark primary color image is obtained, and its transmittance is calculated to obtain the image edge detection result. According to the prior law of dark channel, a classic image dehazing enhancement model is established, and the model is combined with a median filter with low computational complexity to denoise the image in real time and maintain the jump of the mutation area to achieve image dehazing enhancement. The experimental results show that the image dehazing and enhancement effect of the proposed algorithm has obvious advantages, can retain a large amount of image detail information, and the values of information entropy, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity are high. The research innovatively combines a variety of methods to achieve image dehazing and improve the quality effect. Through segmentation, filtering, denoising and other operations, the image quality is effectively improved, which provides an important reference for the improvement of image processing technology.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.175-182
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• 2017

Noises are usually generated by various external causes and low quality devices in image data acquisition and recording as well as by channel interference in image transmission. Since these noise signals result in the loss of information, subsequent image processing is subject to the corruption of the original image. In general, image processing is performed in the mixed noise environment where common types of noise, known to be Gaussian and impulse, are present. This study proposes an iterative weighted mean filter for reducing mixed type of noise. Impulse noise pixels are first turned off in the input image, then $3{\times}3$ sliding window regions are processed by replacing center pixel with the result of weighted mean mask operation. This filtering processes are iterated until all the impulse noise pixels are replaced. Applied to images corrupted by Gaussian noise with ${\sigma}=10$ and different levels of impulse noise, the proposed filtering method improved the PSNR by up to 12.98 dB, 1.97 dB, 1.97 dB respectively, compared to SAWF, AWMF, MMF when impulse noise desities are less than 60%.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.679-684
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• 2023

Venous puncture is widely used to obtain blood samples for pathological examination. Because the invasive venipuncture method using a needle is repeatedly performed, the pain suffered by the patient increases, so our research team pre-developed a miniaturized near-infrared (NIR) imaging system in advance. To improve the image quality of the acquired NIR images, this study aims to model the non-local means (NLM) algorithm, which is well known to be efficient in noise reduction, and analyze its applicability in the system. The developed NIR imaging system is based on the principle that infrared rays pass through dichroic and long-pass filters and are detected by a CMOS sensor module. The proposed NLM algorithm is modeled based on the principle of replacing the pixel from which noise is to be removed with a value that reflects the distances between surrounding pixels. After acquiring an NIR image with a central wavelength of 850 nm, the NLM algorithm was applied to segment the final vein area through histogram equalization. As a result, the coefficient of variation of the NIR image of the vein using the NLM algorithm was 0.247 on average, which was an excellent result compared to conventional filtering methods. In addition, the dice similarity coefficient value of the NLM algorithm was improved by 62.91 and 9.40%, respectively, compared to the median filter and total variation methods. In conclusion, we demonstrated that the NLM algorithm can acquire accurate segmentation of veins acquired with a NIR imaging system.