Magnetic Resonance Image Denoising Based on Laplacian Prior Sparsity Constraint and Nonconvex Second-Order TV Penalty

Abstract

Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is considered as a very powerful imaging modality in clinical examination, but the process of image acquisition and transmission will be affected by noise, resulting in the degradation of imaging quality. In this paper, based on the Laplacian prior sparsity constraint and the nonconvex second order total variation (TV) penalty, we propose a MR images denoising model which consists of three terms. Specifically, in the first term, we use the L2-norm as the fidelity term to control the proximity between the observed image and the recovered MR image. Then, we introduce the Laplacian sparse prior constraint as the second term to mitigate the staircase artifacts in the recovered image. In the third term, we adopt the nonconvex second-order TV penalty to preserve important textures and edges. Finally, we use the alternating direction method of multipliers to solve the corresponding minimization problem. Comparative experiments on clinical data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of PSNR and SSIM values.