Medical Image Denoising Using Bilateral Filter

Medical image processing is used for the diagnosis of diseases by the physicians or radiologists. Noise is introduced to the medical images due to various factors in medical imaging. Noise corrupts the medical images and the quality of the images degrades. This degradation includes suppression of edges, structural details, blurring boundaries etc. To diagnose diseases edge and details preservation are very important. Medical image denoising can help the physicians to diagnose the diseases. Medical images include MRI, CT scan, x-ray images, ultrasound images etc. In this paper we implemented bilateral filtering for medical image denoising. Its formulation & implementation are easy but the performance of bilateral filter depends upon its parameter. Therefore for obtaining the optimum result parameter must be estimated. We have applied bilateral filtering on medical images which are corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise with different values of variances. It is a nonlinear and local technique that preserves the features while smoothing the images. It removes the additive white Gaussian noise effectively but its performance is poor in removing salt and pepper noise.