An Adaptive Anisotropic Diffusion Filter for Noise Reduction in MR Images

Noise reduction is an important image processing method which has wide applications in different fields. The key to noise reduction is to reduce the noise without deteriorating the important features in the images. Anisotropic diffusion filter is one of the methods which satisfy this need and draws much attention from researchers in the past. However, traditional anisotropic diffusion filter has many disadvantages, such as the sensitivity to the noise. In this paper, an improved anisotropic diffusion filter for preprocessing noised MR images is presented. The improved anisotropic diffusion filter uses adaptive threshold selection and a new gradient computation method, which is robust to noise. The proposed method was applied to real MR images and the results are impressive.