Improved Gabor Filter for Extracting Texture Edge Features in Ultrasound Kidney Images

Abstract

The diagnosis of urinary tract calculi begins with a focused history of calculi, evolution of its symptoms and the duration. Computer assisted approaches for analyzing the images have increased since the manual interpretation of the image is a time consuming process and susceptible to human errors. The proposed system develops a multi-scale wavelet based Bayesian speckle suppression method for ultrasound kidney images. The logarithmic transform of the original image is analyzed into the multi-scale wavelet domain. The subband decompositions of ultrasound images have significantly non-Gaussian statistics that are best described by families of heavy-tailed distributions. Bayesian estimators are designed to exploits these statistics. Ultrasound (US) is increasingly considered as a viable alternative imaging modality in computer-assisted Kidney segmentation and disease diagnosis applications. Automatic Kidney segmentation from US images, however, remains a challenge due to speckle noise and various other artifacts inherent to US. This paper, design intensity invariant local image phase features, obtained using improved Gabor filter banks, for extracting edge texture features that occur at core and intermediate layer interfaces. The proposed model does the extension of phase symmetry features to modified gabor mode and their use in automatic extraction of kidney edge texture features from US normal and diseased patient images. The system functionality is proved qualitatively and quantitatively through experimentation for synthetic and real data sets. The localization feature value threshold is evaluated with the training samples of US images. The speckle noise error ratio with respect to the standard US image are compared and experimented.