Copyright © 2012 Zhiwu Liao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We present a new method to estimate noise for a single-slice sinogram of low-dose CT based on the homogenous patches centered at a special pixel, called center point, which has the smallest variance among all sinogram pixels. The homogenous patch, composed by homogenous points, is formed by the points similar to the center point using similarity sorting, similarity decreasing searching, and variance analysis in a very large neighborhood (VLN) to avoid manual selection of parameter for similarity measures.Homogenous pixels in the VLN allow us find the largest number of samples, who have the highest similarities to the center point, for noise estimation, and the noise level can be estimated according to unbiased estimation.Experimental results show that for the simulated noisy sinograms, the method proposed in this paper can obtain satisfied noise estimation results, especially for sinograms with relatively serious noises.