Visualization of biological texture using correlation coefficient images.

Subsurface structural features of biological tissue are visualized using polarized light images. The technique of Pearson correlation coefficient analysis is used to reduce blurring of these features by unpolarized backscattered light and to visualize the regions of high statistical similarities within the noisy tissue images. It is shown that under certain conditions, such correlation coefficient maps are determined by the textural character of tissues and not by the chosen region of interest, providing information on tissue structure. As an example, the subsurface texture of a demineralized tooth sample is enhanced from a noisy polarized light image.