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Background: Digital images are captured using sensors during the data acquisition phase, where they are often contaminated by noise (an undesired random signal). Such noise can also be produced during transmission or by poor-quality lossy image compression. Reducing the noise and enhancing the images are considered the central process to all other digital image processing tasks. The improvement in the performance of image denoising methods would contribute greatly on the results of other image processing techniques. Patch-based denoising methods recently have merged as the state-of-the-art denoising approaches for various additive noise levels. In this work, the use of the state-of-the-art patch-based denoising methods for additive noise reduction is investigated. Various types of image datasets are addressed to conduct this study. Methods: We first explain the type of noise in digital images and discuss various image denoising approaches, with a focus on patch-based denoising methods. Then, we experimentally evaluate both quantitatively and qualitatively the patch-based denoising methods. The patch-based image denoising methods are analyzed in terms of quality and computational time. Results: Despite the sophistication of patch-based image denoising approaches, most patch-based image denoising methods outperform the rest. Fast patch similarity measurements produce fast patch-based image denoising methods. Conclusion: Patch-based image denoising approaches can effectively reduce noise and enhance images. Patch-based image denoising approach is the state-of-the-art image denoising approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For segmenting cerebral blood vessels from the time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography (TOF-MRA) images accurately, we propose a parallel segmentation algorithm based on statistical model with Markov random field (MRF). Firstly, we improve traditional non-local means filter with patch-based Fourier transformation to preprocess the TOF-MRA images. In this step, we mainly utilize the sparseness and self-similarity of the MRA brain images sequence. Secondly, we add the MRF information to the finite mixture mode (FMM) to fit the intensity distribution of medical images. We make use of the MRF in image sequence to estimate the proportion of cerebral tissues. Finally, we choose the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to parallelize the parameter estimation of FMM. A large number of experiments verify the high accuracy and robustness of our approach especially for narrow vessels. The work will offer significant assistance for physicians on the prevention and diagnosis of cerebrovascular diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has been a hot topic of research in recent years. The integration of spectral and spatial context is an effective method for HSI classification. This paper proposes a classification method of HSI based on non-local means (NLM) filtering. Firstly, the classification result of HSI is obtained by adopting the support vector machines. Then, the optimization probability image of spatial structure is obtained by using the spatial context information in the first principal component or the first three principal components of HSI to optimize the initial probability map through the NLM filtering. Finally, the final classification results are calculated based on the maximum probability. Experiment results on three real hyperspectral data demonstrate that the proposed NLM filtering based classification method can improve the classification accuracy significantly. Classification results show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed methods when compared with other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]