Binarize Image Data

I have 10 greyscale brain MRI scans from BrainWeb. They are stored as a 4d numpy array, brains, with shape (10, 181, 217, 181). Each of the 10 brains is made up of 181 slices along

Solution 1:

Your method of converting the image to a binary image basically amounts to random dithering, which is a poor method of creating the illusion of grey values on a binary medium. Old-fashioned print is a binary medium, they have fine-tuned the methods to represent grey-value photographs in print over centuries. This process is called halftoning, and is shaped in part by properties of ink on paper, that we do not have to deal with in binary images.

So what methods have people come up with outside of print? Ordered dithering (mostly Bayer matrix), and error diffusion dithering. Read more about dithering on Wikipedia. I wrote a blog post showing how to implement all of these methods in MATLAB some years ago.

I would recommend you use error diffusion dithering for your particular application. Here is some code in MATLAB (taken from my blog post liked above) for the Floyd-Steinberg algorithm, I hope that you can translate this to Python:

img = imread('https://i.stack.imgur.com/d5E9i.png');
img = img(:,:,1);

out = double(img);
sz = size(out);
for ii=1:sz(1)
   for jj=1:sz(2)
      old = out(ii,jj);
      %new = 255*(old >= 128); % Original Floyd-Steinberg
      new = 255*(old >= 128+(rand-0.5)*100); % Simple improvement
      out(ii,jj) = new;
      err = new-old;
         if jj<sz(2)
            % right
            out(ii  ,jj+1) = out(ii  ,jj+1)-err*(7/16);
         end
      if ii<sz(1)
         if jj<sz(2)
            % right-down
            out(ii+1,jj+1) = out(ii+1,jj+1)-err*(1/16);
         end
            % down
            out(ii+1,jj  ) = out(ii+1,jj  )-err*(5/16);
         if jj>1
            % left-down
            out(ii+1,jj-1) = out(ii+1,jj-1)-err*(3/16);
         end
      end
   end
end

imshow(out)

Resampling the image before applying the dithering greatly improves the results:

img = imresize(img,4);
% (repeat code above)
imshow(out)

NOTE that the above process expects the input to be in the range [0,255]. It is easy to adapt to a different range, say [0,1328] or [0,1], but it is also easy to scale your images to the [0,255] range.

Solution 2:

Have you tried a threshold on the image?

This is a common way to binarize images, rather than trying to apply a random binomial distribution. You could try something like:

binarized_brains = (brains > threshold_value).astype(int)

which returns an array of 0s and 1s according to whether the image value was less than or greater than your chosen threshold value.

You will have to experiment with the threshold value to find the best one for your images, but it does not need to be normalized first.

If this doesn't work well, you can also experiment with the thresholding options available in the skimage filters package.

Solution 3:

IT is easy in OpenCV. as mentioned a very common way is defining a threshold, But your result looks like you are allocating random valuesto your intensities instead of thresholding it. 

import cv2
im = cv2.imread('brain.png', cv2.CV_LOAD_IMAGE_GRAYSCALE)
(th, brain_bw) = cv2.threshold(imy, 128, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY | cv2.THRESH_OTSU)
th = (DEFINE HERE)
im_bin = cv2.threshold(im, th, 255, cv
cv2.imwrite('binBrain.png', brain_bw)

brain

binBrain