Pulse and Breathing Motion Artifacts Correction of Intraoperative Thermal Imaging in Neurosurgery

In this paper, a method is presented to estimate and correct pulse and breathing motion artifacts of infrared (IR) brain images while preserving all-important image information. First, a complex steerable pyramid is carried out to decompose the image sequence and separate the amplitude from their phase. Second, a finite impulse response (FIR) filter is employed to separate the selected frequency bands at each scale and orientation followed by reconstructing the image sequence with corresponding amplitudes. Third, the optical flow method is applied to estimate pulse and breathing motion artifacts only. Fourth, bicubic interpolation is performed to compensate the estimated motion artifacts of the original thermal image sequence. To evaluate the motion correction performance and accuracy, four metrics are applied, as well as the analysis of a single pixel frequency spectrum before and after pulse and breathing motion artifacts correction. Results provide evidence that the proposed method can compensate pulse and breathing motion artifacts while preserving image structures, spatial resolution, and maintaining temperature values.