A novel structured dictionary for fast processing of 3D medical images, with application to computed tomography restoration and denoising

摘要

Sparse representation of signals in learned overcomplete dictionaries has proven to be a powerful tool with applications in denoising, restoration, compression, reconstruction, and more. Recent research has shown that learned overcomplete dictionaries can lead to better results than analytical dictionaries such as wavelets in almost all image processing applications. However, a major disadvantage of these dictionaries is that their learning and usage is very computationally intensive. In particular, finding the sparse representation of a signal in these dictionaries requires solving an optimization problem that leads to very long computational times, especially in 3D image processing. Moreover, the sparse representation found by greedy algorithms is usually sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose a novel two-level dictionary structure that improves the performance and the speed of standard greedy sparse coding methods. The first (i.e., the top) level in our dictionary is a fixed orthonormal basis, whereas the second level includes the atoms that are learned from the training data. We explain how such a dictionary can be learned from the training data and how the sparse representation of a new signal in this dictionary can be computed. As an application, we use the proposed dictionary structure for removing the noise and artifacts in 3D computed tomography (CT) images. Our experiments with real CT images show that the proposed method achieves results that are comparable with standard dictionary-based methods while substantially reducing the computational time.