'VSB Technical University of Ostrava, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences'
Doi
Abstract
In this paper, Bidimensional Empirical
Mode Decomposition (BEMD) based Cross Bilateral
Filter (CBF) technique for speckle reduction in ultra-
sound images has been proposed. The reference image
is obtained by denoising the noisy image using pixel-
wise Wiener filtering. Then, both the noisy image and
the reference image are decomposed into a set of In-
trinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) and the residue im-
age using BEMD technique. CBF is applied between
noisy image IMFs and the corresponding reference im-
age IMFs. The image is reconstructed back with these
modified IMFs and the residue. The proposed method
exploits the edge information in the reference image for
improving the quality of the denoised image. The per-
formance of the proposed method has been tested for
real ultrasound images and simulated images having
noise of different variance. The experimental results
show that the proposed algorithm performs better than
other state-of-art methods in terms of Edge Keeping
Index (EKI), Correlation Coefficient (CC), Figure of
Merit (FOM), Structural Similarity (SSIM), Peak Sig-
nal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Signal to Noise Ratio
(SNR) for synthetic images. The algorithm gives bet-
ter performance for real ultrasound images in terms of
Mean to Variance Ratio (MVR) and Equivalent Num-
ber of Looks (ENL)