The effect of anatomical noise on perception of low contrast in intra-oral radiographs. An in vitro study.

Radiographic images suffer from varying amounts of noise. The most studied and discussed of these is random noise. However, recent research has shown that projected anatomy contributes substantially to noise, especially when detecting low-contrast objects in the images. Our aim, therefore, was to evaluate the extent to which over-projected anatomical noise affects the detection of low-contrast objects in intra-oral images.