Speckle Noise Reduction in Medical Ultrasound Images Using Modelling of Shearlet Coefficients as a Nakagami Prior

The diagnosis of UltraSound (US) medical images is affected due to the presence of speckle noise. This noise degrades the diagnostic quality of US images by reducing small details and edges present in the image. This paper presents a novel method based on shearlet coefficients modeling of log-transformed US images. Noise-free log-transformed coefficients are modeled as Nakagami distribution and speckle noise coefficients are modeled as Gaussian distribution. Method of Log Cumulants (MoLC) and Method of Moments (MoM) are used for parameter estimation of Nakagami distribution and noise free shearlet coefficients respectively. Then noise free shearlet coefficients are obtained using Maximum a Posteriori (MaP) estimation of noisy coefficients. The experimental results were presented by performing various experiments on synthetic and real US images. Subjective and objective quality assessment of the proposed method is presented and is compared with six other existing methods. The effectiveness of the proposed method over other methods can be seen from the obtained results

A Novel Directionlet-Based Image Denoising Method Using MMSE Estimator and Laplacian Mixture Distribution

A novel method based on directionlet transform is proposed for image denoising under Bayesian framework. In order to achieve noise removal, the directionlet coefficients of the uncorrupted image are modeled independently and identically by a two-state Laplacian mixture model with zero mean. The expectation-maximization algorithm is used to estimate the parameters that characterize the assumed prior model. Within the framework of Bayesian theory, the directionlet coefficients of noise-free image are estimated by a nonlinear shrinkage function based on weighted average of the minimum mean square error estimator. We demonstrate through simulations with images contaminated by additive white Gaussian noise that the proposed method is very competitive when compared with other methods in terms of both peak signal-to-noise ratio and visual quality