Objective Assessment of Noise Presence in Diagnostic Radiographic Images

Objective evaluation of the effect of noise on diagnostic image quality of radiographic (X-ray) images provides an opportunity for autonomous elimination of noise and optimisation of overall quality of such imagery that meets the requirements of radiologists. Four objective measures of the effect of noise on the quality of diagnostic images are described in this paper. The aim of the metrics is to correspond as closely as possible to the quality assessments made by radiological diagnosticians. Of the proposed metrics, analysis of local coherence gives the best results, primarily for calcified tissue images, such as spine, hand and knee images.