How to remove background noise from image?

Hello,

I study bone regeneration and I need to process stacks of micro-CT images. An example of those is provided in the attached document. The image shows a bone scaffold (horizontal bright white bars) and some features in between that correspond to bone that has grown.

I need to segment the image to quantify the amount of bone regenerated. However, this is hard, given that the background between the scaffold bars is very noisy. My knowledge of image processing is not very extended, but I know some basics. I tried a number of filters (median, wiener, unsharp contrast enhancement, imsharpen..) but nothing seems to work.

Does anyone have suggestions for me?

Thanks!!

[Laurence]

Sorry, I forgot to insert it... This is the attached document

Answer 1

[Dan]

Well.... my knee-jerk reaction is to 1) Use a template to remove the bone scaffold 2) Use a smoothing filter (low-pass filter) to minimize high frequency variations in the area of interest. 3) Perhaps try one of the morphological operators to further separate out growing regions from noise. 4) Threshold the resulting image and count the pixels.

But.... that's pretty simpleminded....

Dan

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

Why didn't it work? What happened when you summed up the gray levels in the noise-reduced region between the bars? Did it not correlate with what you thought it should - the anticipated growth amount, say as corroborated with a gravimetric method?