Affiliations: [a]
School of Mathematical Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
| [b]
Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Imaging Technology, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Hongwei Li, School of Mathematical Sciences, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Imaging Technology, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100048, China. E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: Reducing radiation dose while maintaining the quality of the reconstructed images is a major challenge in the computed tomography (CT) community. In light of the non-stationary Gaussian noise distribution, we developed a model that incorporates a noise-level weighted total variation (NWTV) regularization term for denoising the projection data. Contrary to the well-known edge-weighted total variation method, which aims for better edge preserving, the proposed NWTV tries to adapt the regularization with the spatially varying noise levels. Experiments on simulated data as well as the real imaging data suggest that the proposed NWTV regularization could achieve quite competitive results. For sinograms with sharp edges, the NWTV could do a better job at balancing noise reduction and edge preserving, such that noise is removed in a more uniform manner. Another conclusion from our experiments is that the well-recognized stair-casing artifacts of TV regularization play little role in the reconstructed images when the NWTV method is applied to low-dose CT imaging data.
Keywords: Denoising, weighted total variation, low-dose ct, non-stationary gaussian
noise
