Comparison of different image enhancing techniques for medical thermal images

Ricardo Vardasca*, Joaquim Gabriel, Peter Plassmann, Francis Ring, Carl Jones

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Medical infrared (IR) images are, like other medical images, sensitive to noise, which affects directly the temperature measurement of the subject. There are several noise removal techniques that have good performance on digital images, but may produce different temperature readings on thermal images. Hundred and twenty different noisy images were selected from a database and after being processed with several noise removal techniques, the result was statistically analyzed using the standard parameters: maximum, minimum and mean temperature, standard deviation of same region of interest, root mean square error, signal to noise ratio, cross correlation coefficient. In the end, all techniques were compared and graded according with the results. This investigation shows that all techniques produce different results, the recommended method for improving medical thermal images are the Median, Mean and Wiener filters. Results however suggest that noise filtering should only be applied when specifically needed.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)709-714
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Medical Imaging and Health Informatics
Volume5
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2015

Keywords

  • Image enhancing
  • Image filtering
  • Infrared imaging
  • Medical thermography
  • Noise processing

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