New approach to the impulsive noise removal in microarray images

In this paper a new method of impulsive noise reduction in microarray images is presented. The new technique is capable of attenuating impulsive noise, while preserving the sharpness of the image edges. Extensive simulations reveal that the new method outperforms significantly the standard techniques widely used in multivariate signal processing. In this work we apply the new noise reduction method for the enhancement of the images of the microarray chips. We demonstrate that the new technique is capable of reducing impulsive noise, which is very often present in the microarray images and that it enables efficient spot localization and estimation of the gene expression level, due to the smoothing effect and preservation of the spot edges. This paper contains the comparison of the efficiency of the new technique of noise reduction with the standard procedures used for the processing of vector valued images, as well as examples of the efficiency of the new algorithm when applied to typical microarray images. Copyright (C) 2003 IFAC.