Abstract
BackgroundSpeckles in ultrasound imaging affect image quality and can make the post-processing difficult. Speckle reduction technologies have been employed for removing speckles for some time. One of the effective speckle reduction technologies is anisotropic diffusion. Anisotropic diffusion technology can remove the speckles effectively while preserving the edges of the image and thus has drawn great attention from image processing scientists. However, the proposed methods in the past have different disadvantages, such as being sensitive to the number of iterations or low capability of preserving the details of the ultrasound images. Thus a detail preserved anisotropic diffusion speckle reduction with less sensitive to the number of iterations is needed. This paper aims to develop this kind of technologies.ResultsIn this paper, we propose a robust detail preserving anisotropic diffusion filter (RDPAD) for speckle reduction. In order to get robust diffusion, the proposed method integrates Tukey error norm function into the detail preserving anisotropic diffusion filter (DPAD) developed recently. The proposed method could prohibit over-diffusion and thus is less sensitive to the number of iterationsConclusionsThe proposed anisotropic diffusion can preserve the important structure information of the original image while reducing speckles. It is also less sensitive to the number of iterations. Experimental results on real ultrasound images show the effectiveness of the proposed anisotropic diffusion filter.
Highlights
Speckles in ultrasound imaging affect image quality and can make the post-processing difficult
In order to test the performance of the proposed method, we have performed several experiments on ultrasound images
The proposed method was compared with the speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion (SRAD) algorithm [18] developed by Yu and the detail preserving anisotropic diffusion filter (DPAD) algorithm developed by Aja-Fernandez [22]
Summary
Speckles in ultrasound imaging affect image quality and can make the post-processing difficult. The presence of speckle degrades the quality of Different methods have been investigated for speckle reduction These methods include early methods such as Lee filter [3], Frost filter [4], Kuan filter [5], and recently developed methods such as adaptive filters [6,7], wavelet transform [8,9,10,11], bilateral filters [12], nonlocal-means [13] and anisotropic diffusion filters [14,15,16,17,18], etc. The SRAD has been further applied to 3D ultrasound images [19,20] and obtained good performance Another improvement for anisotropic diffusion filter is the work in [23]. Inspired by the success of the work [17,23], we will further improve the robustness of the DPAD in this paper
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