Removing Scattered Light in Biomedical Images

Scattered light is a common issue in various biomedical images such as fluorescence and X-ray images, leading to a hazy view of the imaging objects and thus degrading the image quality. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a novel mathematical model to remove such scattered light. Our model is guaranteed to produce an image with better image contrast than the input. We also present a Local Guided Total Variation filter to solve this model. The proposed filter has linear computation complexity with respect to the total number of pixels, resulting in a high computational performance. Extensive experiments have been conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model and efficiency of the presented filter. Our method can be applied to a wide range of images to remove their scattered light. The open-source code is publicly available at http://gyh8.github.io.