Adaptive ultrasonic speckle reduction based on the slope-facet model
Journal
Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology
Journal Volume
29
Journal Issue
8
Pages
1161-1175
Date Issued
2003
Author(s)
Abstract
The flat-facet model has been implicitly assumed for the structure of the image surface by most conventional speckle-reduction algorithms. However, this model is rarely found in a real ultrasound (US) image. To preserve the higher order structures and to capture the spatially variant property of the speckle, a new adaptive speckle-reduction algorithm, called the symmetrical speckle-reduction filter (SSRF), was developed based on the slope-facet model. The basic idea of the SSRF was to estimate the uncorrupted signal on the largest symmetrical slope facet centered at each target pixel. The symmetry constraint ensured the correctness of the mean value. An empirical speckle model was incorporated to account for the nature of the speckle in US image. A two-stage despeckling strategy was employed to enhance the statistical reliability of each estimate by forming a union of a set of symmetrical despeckling windows. The proposed SSRF algorithm was compared with two filtered-based and one wavelet-based approaches and the experimental results showed that the proposed SSRF outperformed these three previous approaches in both the synthetic images and the clinical US images tested in this study. © 2003 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology.
Subjects
Flat-facet model; Signal-dependent noise; Slope-facet model; Speckle model; Speckle reduction; Symmetrical window; Ultrasound image
Other Subjects
Algorithms; Speckle; Statistical methods; Slope-facet models; Ultrasonic applications; algorithm; article; imaging system; model; priority journal; reliability; ultrasound
Type
journal article
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