Speckle Noise Reduction in Fetal Ultrasound Images

Abstract

This research offers an innovative way to reduce the speckle noise which associated with the ultrasound imaging. This in turn leads to improving the input image and raise the human diagnostic performance. It uses an Undecimated Wavelet Transform UWT to decompose the image signal to the coefficients, to take the diagonal coefficient and applied Independent Directional Mask after replacing the value of each pixel in this coefficient with the corresponding pixel in the original image, this result yields after applying median filter in case the value of the pixel is smaller than the threshold value which is pre-specified. Then we apply the Smoothing Directional filter and re-directed the formation of the new diagonal coefficient, and then make the inverse undecimated wavelet transform IUWT to form the resulting image after reducing the noise of it (De-speckled Image). The used method showed a clear improvement on several ultrasound images via traditional statistical measurements (PSNR and MSE) and outperformed the other methods which used in common to reduce the speckle noise.