• Korean Journal of Radiology
• /
• v.22 no.9
• /
• pp.1525-1536
• /
• 2021

Objective: To investigate the feasibility of cine three-dimensional (3D) balanced steady-state free precession (b-SSFP) imaging combined with a non-local means (NLM) algorithm for image denoising in evaluating cardiac function in children with repaired tetralogy of Fallot (rTOF). Materials and Methods: Thirty-five patients with rTOF (mean age, 12 years; range, 7-18 years) were enrolled to undergo cardiac cine image acquisition, including two-dimensional (2D) b-SSFP, 3D b-SSFP, and 3D b-SSFP combined with NLM. End-diastolic volume (EDV), end-systolic volume (ESV), stroke volume (SV), and ejection fraction (EF) of the two ventricles were measured and indexed by body surface index. Acquisition time and image quality were recorded and compared among the three imaging sequences. Results: 3D b-SSFP with denoising vs. 2D b-SSFP had high correlation coefficients for EDV, ESV, SV, and EF of the left (0.959-0.991; p < 0.001) as well as right (0.755-0.965; p < 0.001) ventricular metrics. The image acquisition time ± standard deviation (SD) was 25.1 ± 2.4 seconds for 3D b-SSFP compared with 277.6 ± 0.7 seconds for 2D b-SSFP, indicating a significantly shorter time with the 3D than the 2D sequence (p < 0.001). Image quality score was better with 3D b-SSFP combined with denoising than with 3D b-SSFP (mean ± SD, 3.8 ± 0.6 vs. 3.5 ± 0.6; p = 0.005). Signal-to-noise ratios for blood and myocardium as well as contrast between blood and myocardium were higher for 3D b-SSFP combined with denoising than for 3D b-SSFP (p < 0.05 for all but septal myocardium). Conclusion: The 3D b-SSFP sequence can significantly reduce acquisition time compared to the 2D b-SSFP sequence for cine imaging in the evaluation of ventricular function in children with rTOF, and its quality can be further improved by combining it with an NLM denoising method.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
• /
• 2010.11a
• /
• pp.683-686
• /
• 2010

본 논문은 영상 내에서 영역을 분할하여 영상 잡음을 효과적으로 제거하는 기법을 제안한다. 제안한 방법을 통해 잡음 영상을 영역 분할 경우 잡음부분까지 영역 분할되는 문제가 발생하기 때문에 잡음 영상을 저대역(Low-pass) 필터를 통과함으로써 잡음을 최소화한다. 저대역 필터를 통과한 영상에서 에지를 추출하여 비정상적인 에지의 추출을 방지함으로써 영상이 가진 근본적인 에지를 정확하게 추출한다. 획득한 에지 정보를 바탕으로 각 영역간의 히스토그램의 평균 오차를 이용하여 영역을 분할한다. 분할된 영역은 각 영역별로 저대역(Low-pass) 필터를 통과시킴으로써 영역에 맞는 잡음 제거를 통해서 더욱 빠르고 효과적으로 제거한다. 본 논문의 방법은 기존의 학습을 통한 잡음 제거 방법과 다르게 학습 시간이 요구되지 않으며, Non-local Means의 방법과 다르게 큰 연산량을 요구하지 않기 때문에 유사한 성능으로 빠른 잡음 제거를 할 수 있다.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.321-326
• /
• 2019

Image denoising methods based on block matching are founded on the experimental observations that neighboring patches or blocks in images retain similar features with each other, and have been proved to show superior performance in denoising different kinds of noise. The methods, however, take into account only neighboring blocks in searching for similar blocks, and ignore the characteristic features of the reference block itself. Consequently, denoising performance is negatively affected when outliers of the Gaussian distribution are included in the reference block which is to be denoised. In this paper, we propose an expanded block matching method in which noisy images are first decomposed into a number of bit-planes, then the range of true signals are estimated based on the distribution of pixels on the bit-planes, and finally outliers are replaced by the neighboring pixels belonging to the estimated range. In this way, the advantages of the conventional Gaussian filter can be added to the blocking matching method. We tested the proposed method through extensive experiments with well known test-bed images, and observed that performance gain can be achieved by the proposed method.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.21 no.9
• /
• pp.1044-1051
• /
• 2018

In this paper, we propose a new method to improve low light image. In order to improve the image quality of a night image with a moving object as much as the quality of a daytime image, the following tasks were performed. Firstly, we reduce the noisy of the input night image and improve the night image by the tone mapping method. Secondly, we segment the input night image into a foreground with motion and a background without motion. The motion is detected using both the difference between the current frame and the previous frame and the difference between the current frame and the night background image. The background region of the night image takes pixels from corresponding positions in the daytime image. The foreground regions of the night image take the pixels from the corresponding positions of the image which is improved by the tone mapping method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the visual quality more clearly than the existing methods.