Determination of optimal parameters for bilateral filter in brain MR image denoising

Noise elimination is an important pre-processing step in magnetic resonance (MR) images for clinical purposes. In the present study, as an edge-preserving method, bilateral filter (BF) was used for Rician noise removal in MR images. The choice of BF parameters affects the performance of denoising. Therefore, as a novel approach, the parameters of BF were optimized using genetic algorithm (GA). First, the Rician noise with different variances (sigma=10, 20, 30) was added to simulated T1-weighted brain MR images. To find the optimum filter parameters, GA was applied to the noisy images in searching regions of window size [3 x 3, 5 x 5, 7 x 7,11 x 11, and 21 x 21], spatial sigma [0.1-10] and intensity sigma [1-60]. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) was adjusted as fitness value for optimization. After determination of optimal parameters, we investigated the results of proposed BF parameters with both the simulated and clinical MR images. In order to understand the importance of parameter selection in BF, we compared the results of denoising with proposed parameters and other previously used BFs using the quality metrics such as mean squared error (MSE), PSNR, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and structural similarity index metric (SSIM). The quality of the denoised images with the proposed parameters was validated using both visual inspection and quantitative metrics. The experimental results showed that the BF with parameters proposed by us showed a better performance than BF with other previously proposed parameters in both the preservation of edges and removal of different level of Rician noise from MR images. It can be concluded that the performance of BF for denoising is highly dependent on optimal parameter selection. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.