An adaptive speckle suppression filter for medical ultrasound imaging

Cataloged from PDF version of article.An adaptive smoothing technique for speckle suppression in medical B-scan ultrasonic imaging is presented. The technique is based on filtering with appropriately shaped and sized local kernels. For each image pixel, a filtering kernel, which fits to the local homogeneous region containing the processed pixel, is obtained through a local statistics based region growing technique. Performance of the proposed filter has been tested on the phantom and tissue images. The results show that the filter effectively reduces the speckle while preserving the resolvable details. The simulation results are presented in a comparative way with two existing speckle suppression methods. © 1995 IEE

Speckle Noise Reduction in Medical Ultrasound Images

Ultrasound imaging is an incontestable vital tool for diagnosis, it provides in non-invasive manner the internal structure of the body to detect eventually diseases or abnormalities tissues. Unfortunately, the presence of speckle noise in these images affects edges and fine details which limit the contrast resolution and make diagnostic more difficult. In this paper, we propose a denoising approach which combines logarithmic transformation and a non linear diffusion tensor. Since speckle noise is multiplicative and nonwhite process, the logarithmic transformation is a reasonable choice to convert signaldependent or pure multiplicative noise to an additive one. The key idea from using diffusion tensor is to adapt the flow diffusion towards the local orientation by applying anisotropic diffusion along the coherent structure direction of interesting features in the image. To illustrate the effective performance of our algorithm, we present some experimental results on synthetically and real echographic images

Speckle Suppression in Ultrasonic Images Based on Undecimated Wavelets

An original method to denoise ultrasonic images affected by speckle is presented. Speckle is modeled as a signal-dependent noise corrupting the image. Noise reduction is approached as a Wiener-like filtering performed in a shift-invariant wavelet domain by means of an adaptive rescaling of the coefficients of an undecimated octave decomposition. The scaling factor of each coefficient is calculated from local statistics of the degraded image, the parameters of the noise model, and the wavelet filters. Experimental results demonstrate that excellent background smoothing as well as preservation of edge sharpness and fine details can be obtained