Performance analysis of reshaped Gabor filter for removing the Rician distributed noise in brain MR images

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an essential clinical tool for detecting the abnormalities such as tumors and clots in the human brain. The brain MR images are contaminated by artifacts and noise that follow Rician distribution during the acquisition process. It causes the loss of fine details information, distortion, and a blurred vision of the image. A reshaped Gabor filter-based denoising technique is proposed to overcome these issues. To develop the reshaped Gabor filter, the range of reshaping parameters of the filter is initially obtained by a random search method. Further, to evaluate the better performance of the proposed filter, a manual search is used to find the optimal parametric values and tested on T1, T2, and PD weighted MR data sets one by one. Also, the proposed technique is compared with the existing state of the art filtering methods such as Wiener, Median, Partial differential equation (PDE), Anisotropic diffusion filter (ADF), Non-local means filter (NLM), Modified complex diffusion filter (MCD), Multichannel residual learning of CNN (MRL), Maximum a posteriori (MAP), Adaptive non-local means algorithm (ADNLM), and Advance NLM filtering with non-sub sampled (AVNLMNS) on the basic reference and no reference parameter. The parameters such as mean square error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index metric (SSIM), perception-based image quality evaluator (PIQE), and blind/referenceless image spatial quality evaluator (BRISQE) are evaluated on T1, T2, and PD weighted MR images with different noise variances such as 1%, 3%, 5%, 7%, and 9%. The proposed method may be used as a better denoising scheme for Rician distributed noise, edge preservation, fine details restoration, and enhancement of abnormalities.