ADAPTIVE TRIMMED MEAN AUTOREGRESSIVE MODEL FOR REDUCTION OF POISSON NOISE IN SCINTIGRAPHIC IMAGES

A 2-D Adaptive Trimmed Mean Autoregressive (ATMAR) model has been proposed for denoising of medical images corrupted with Poisson noise. Unfiltered images are divided into smaller chunks and ATMAR model is applied on each chunk separately. In this paper, two 5x5 windows with 40% overlap are used to predict the center pixel value of the central row. The AR coefficients are updated by sliding both windows forward with 60% shift. The same process is repeated to scan the entire image for prediction of a new denoised image. The Adaptive Trimmed Mean Filter (ATMF) eradicates the lowest and highest variations in pixel values of the ATMAR model denoised image and also average out the remaining neighborhood pixel values. Finally, power-law transformation is applied to the resultant image of the ATMAR model for contrast stretching. Image quality is judged in terms of correlation, Mean Squared Error (MSE), Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the image with latest denoising techniques. The proposed technique showed an efficient way to scale down Poisson noise in scintigraphic images on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The highest correlation 0.9706, PSNR 10.023 and MSE 25.902 is achieved by the proposed technique.