Geometric moment based nonlocal-means filter for ultrasound image denoising

Abstract

It is inevitable that there is speckle noise in ultrasound image. Despeckling is the important process. The original nonlocal means (NLM) filter can remove speckle noise and protect the texture information effectively when the image corruption degree is relatively low. But when the noise in the image is strong, NLM will produce fictitious texture information, which has the disadvantageous influence on its denoising performance. In this paper, a novel nonlocal means (NLM) filter is proposed. We introduce geometric moments into the NLM filter. Though geometric moments are not orthogonal moments, it is popular by its concision, and its restoration ability is not yet proved. Results on synthetic data and real ultrasound image show that the proposed method can get better despeckling performance than other state-of-the-art method.