Asymptomatic COVID-19 CT image denoising method based on wavelet transform combined with improved PSO

The quality of asymptomatic corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) computed tomography (CT) image is reduced due to interference from Gaussian noise, which affects the subsequent image processing. Aiming at the problem that asymptomatic COVID-19 CT image often have small flake ground-glass shadow in the early lesions, and the density is low, which is easily confused with noise. A denoising method of wavelet transform with shrinkage factor is proposed. The threshold decreases with the increase of decomposition scale, and it reduces the misjudgment of signal points. In the advanced stage, the range of lesions increases, with consolidation and fibrosis in different sizes, which have similar gray value to the CT images of suspected cases. Aiming at the problems of low contrast and fuzzy boundary in the traditional wavelet transform, the threshold function based on the optimization of parameters combined with the improved particle swam optimization (PSO) is proposed, so that the parameters of wavelet threshold function can change adaptively according to the lung lobe and ground-glass lesions with fewer iterations. The simulation results show that the paper method is significantly better than other algorithms in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and mean absolute error (MSE). For example, aiming at the early asymptomatic COVID-19, compared with the comparison methods, the PSNR under the proposed method has increased by about 5 dB, the MSE has been greatly reduced, and the SNR has increased by about 6.1 dB. It can be seen that the denoising effect under the proposed method is the best.