Real-time Local Noise Filter in 3D Visualization of CT Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time, spatially variant noise filtering method for 3D CT visualization that enhances image quality without compromising processing speed.

Contribution

It proposes a novel spatially variant filtering technique that effectively reduces broadband noise in CT data during real-time visualization.

Findings

Significant improvement in visual quality of CT images.

Processing time remains within milliseconds.

Outperforms four similar filters in entropy reduction.

Abstract

Removing noise in computer tomography (CT) data for real-time 3D visualization is vital to improving the quality of the final display. However, the CT noise cannot be removed by straight averaging because the noise has a broadband spatial frequency that is overlapping with the interesting signal frequencies. To improve the display of structures and features contained in the data, we present spatially variant filtering that performs averaging of sub-regions around a central region. We compare our filter with four other similar spatially variant filters regarding entropy and processing time. The results demonstrate significant improvement of the visual quality with processing time still within the millisecond range.