Neutrosophic Based Nakagami Total Variation Method for Speckle Suppression in Thyroid Ultrasound Images

Abstract

BackgroundNeutrosophic based methods are becoming very popular in denoising of images due to the capability of handling indeterminacy. The main goal of denoising is to maintain balance between edge preservation and speckle reduction. MethodsTo achieve this, neutrosophic based total variation method using Nakagami statistics have been explored to develop an efficient speckle reduction method. The proposed Neutrosophic based Nakagami Total Variation (NNTV) method initially transforms the image into the neutrosophic domain and then employs the neutrosophic filtering process for speckle reduction. The NNTV quantifies the indeterminacy of image by determining the entropy of indeterminate set. ResultsThe performance of the proposed method has been evaluated quantitatively by quality metrics on synthetic images, qualitatively using real thyroid ultrasound images through visual examination by medical experts and by Mean Opinion Score. ConclusionFrom results, it has been observed that NNTV method performed better than other speckle reduction methods in terms of both speckle suppression and edge preservation.