A New Nonlinear Diffusion Method to Improve Image Quality

Yue Zhang, Xiaoyin Xu, Hongmin Cai, S. P. Yung, Stephen T. C. Wong

Abstract: We propose a nonlinear diffusion method based on the gradient vector field construction to remove noises in image while preserving fine details. The blocky effect and over-smoothing, as usually seen in images processed by diffusion operators, are greatly reduced by our method. Results obtained from various images, including synthetic and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), are used to demonstrate the performance of our new method. Comparing it with other diffusion methods, we find it obtains better performance in terms of removing noises without destroying detail features of images.