Removing Scattered Light In Biomedical Images

Scattered light frequently appears in various biomedical images such as fluorescence and X-ray images. The scattered light leads to a hazy view of the imaging objects and thus downgrades the image quality. To computationally remove such scattered light, this paper proposes a novel mathematical model, which is guaranteed to produce an image with better image contrast than the input image. Moreover, to solve this model, a Local Guided Total Variation filter is proposed, which has linear computation complexity with respect to the total number of pixels, leading to 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 in a large range of images to remove their scattered light. The open-source code is publicly available from the authors' website.