Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images are frequently sensitive to certain types of noises and artifacts. The denoising of MRI images is essential for improving visual quality and reliability of the quantitative analysis of diagnosis and treatment. In this article, a new block difference-based filtering method is proposed to denoise the MRI images. First, the normal MRI image is degraded by a certain percentage of noise. The block difference between the intensity of the normal and noisy MRI is computed, and then it is compared with the intensity of the blocks of the normal MRI image. Based on the comparison, the pixel weights are updated to each block of the denoised MRI image. Observational results are brought out on the BrainWeb and BraTS datasets and evaluated by performance metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index measures, universal quality index, and root mean square error. The proposed method outperforms the existing denoising filtering techniques. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.