Speckle Noise Removal by Energy Models with New Regularization Setting

For removing the speckle noise in ultrasound images, researchers have proposed many models based on energy minimization methods. At the same time, traditional models have some disadvantages, such as, the low speed of energy diffusion which can not preserve the sharp edges. In order to overcome those disadvantages, we introduce an adaptive total variation model to deal with speckle noise in ultrasound image for retaining the fine detail effectively and enhancing the speed of energy diffusion. Firstly, a new convex function is employed as regularization term in the adaptive total variation model. Secondly, the diffusion properties of the new model are analyzed through the physical characteristics of local coordinates. The new energy model has different diffusion velocities in different gradient regions. Numerical experimental results show that the proposed model for speckle noise removal is superior to traditional models, not only in visual effect, but also in quantitative measures.

Total variation has been used as a popular and effective image prior model in the regularization-based image processing fields. However, as the total variation model favors a piecewise constant solution, the processing result under high noise intensity in the flat regions of the image is often poor, and some “pseudo-edges” are produced. In this paper, we develop a regional spatially adaptive total variation (RSATV) model. Firstly, the spatial information is extracted based on each pixel, and then two filtering processes are respectively added to suppress the effect of “pseudo-edges”. After that, the spatial information weight is constructed and classified with kmeans clustering, and the regularization strength in each region is controlled by the clustering center value. The experimental results, on both simulated and real datasets, show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the “pseudo-edges” of the total variation regularization in the flat regions, and maintain the partial smoothness of the highresolution image. More importantly, compared with the traditional pixel-based spatial information adaptive approach, the proposed region-based spatial information adaptive total variation model can better avoid the effect of noise on the spatial information extraction, and maintains robustness with changes in the noise intensity in the super-resolution process. Index Terms—Super-resolution, total variation, regional spatially adaptive, majorization-minimization

Ultrasound (US) images are useful in medical diagnosis. US is preferred over other medical diagnosis technique because it is non-invasive in nature and has low cost. The presence of speckle noise in US images degrades its usefulness. A method that reduces the speckle noise in US images can help in correct diagnosis. This method also should preserve the important structural information in US images while removing the speckle noise. In this paper, a method for removing speckle noise using a combination of wavelet, total variation (TV) and morphological operations has been proposed. The proposed method achieves denoising by combining the advantages of the wavelet, TV and morphological operations along with the utilization of adaptive regularization parameter which controls the amount of smoothing during denoising. The work in this paper has the capability of reducing speckle noise while preserving the structural information in the denoised image. The proposed method demonstrates strong denoising for synthetic and real ultrasound images, which is also supported by the results of various quantitative measures and visual inspection.

The problem for image restoration is usually reduced to a constraint optimization problem. Different choice of optimization operator leads to various restoration models, e.g. least squares model and original total variation (TV) model. The TV model and its modified version can efficiently preserve the edge of the restored image well, but there exist obvious staircases in smooth area of the restored image. To reduce those staircases, we propose a new modified TV model, by adding a constraint term for smooth area protection as a penalty function. The numerical experiment shows our model can not only preserve the edge as well as TV model, but also efficiently reduce the staircase appearing in the smooth areas. Furthermore, It is shown that the restored image by our model has higher signal-to-noise ratio, less mean square error and better visual effect than those by the least squares model and by the TV models.

Ultrasound images are widely used in diagnosis and therapy. However the existence of speckle will disgraces image quality and affects the tasks of individual interpretation and diagnosis. Nonlocal total variation (TV) denoising is one of the best denoising models and it is widely used to remove additive Gaussian noise. In this paper, we extend the application of nonlocal TV denoising model to remove speckle noise in ultrasound images. We present a model of the speckle noise in ultrasound images firstly. Then we propose an efficient algorithm to minimize the nonlocal TV energy based on the Split-Bregman method. At last we compare our nonlocal TV method with some well-known speckle noise filtering techniques and measure the denoising quality by different evaluating indicators. Experimental results show that the speckle noise can be efficiently removed by our method and the structure of the object can be well preserved, also our algorithm has the best performance among the algorithms of state-of-the-arts.

We propose an adaptive total variation (TV) model by introducing the steerable filter into the TV‐based diffusion process for image filtering. The local energy measured by the steerable filter can effectively characterize the object edges and ramp regions and guide the TV‐based diffusion process so that the new model behaves like the TV model at edges and leads to linear diffusion in flat and ramp regions. This way, the proposed model can provide a better image processing tool which enables noise removal, edge‐preserving, and staircase suppression.

The noise pollution in tourist street view images is caused by various reasons. A major challenge that researchers have been facing is to find a way to effectively remove noise. Although in the past few decades people have proposed many methods of denoising tourist street scene images, the research on denoising technology of tourist street scene images is still not outdated. There is no doubt that it has become a basic and important research topic in the field of digital image processing. The evolutionary diffusion method based on partial differential equations is helpful to improve the quality of noisy tourist street scene images. This method can process tourist street scene images according to people’s expected diffusion behavior. The adaptive total variation model proposed in this paper is improved on the basis of the total variation model and the Gaussian thermal diffusion model. We analyze the classic variational PDE-based denoising model and get a unified variational PDE energy functional model. We also give a detailed analysis of the diffusion performance of the total variational model and then propose an adaptive total variational diffusion model. By improving the diffusion coefficient and introducing a curvature operator that can distinguish details such as edges, it can effectively denoise the tourist street scene image, and it also has a good effect on avoiding the step effect. Through the improvement of the ROF model, the loyalty term and regular term of the model are parameterized, the adaptive total variation denoising model of this paper is established, and a detailed analysis is carried out. The experimental results show that compared with some traditional denoising models, the model in this paper can effectively suppress the step effect in the denoising process, while protecting the texture details of the edge area of the tourist street scene image. In addition, the model in this paper is superior to traditional denoising models in terms of denoising performance and texture structure protection.

Image segmentation is an important step in automatic fingerprint identification systems. While tremendous progress has been made in rolled and plain fingerprint segmentation, the segmentation of latent fingerprints is still a difficult problem. Features used for rolled and plain fingerprint images fail to work properly on latent images due to the poor quality in ridge information and the presence of multiple types of strong structured noise. In this work, we present an adaptive total variation (TV) model to achieve effective latent fingerprint segmentation. The proposed solution can remove various types of structured noise existing in a single latent image and automatically locate the region of interest (ROI), which contains primarily the latent fingerprint. Then, the following tasks such as fingerprint feature extraction and matching can be conducted in the ROI only. In the proposed TV-based image model, one can adaptively adjust the weight coefficient of the fidelity term in L1-norm depending on the background noise level, which is estimated via TV-based texture analysis. We apply the proposed TV-based segmentation algorithm to the NIST SD27 latent fingerprint database to demonstrate its superior performance.

Several methods based on Total Variation (TV) have been proposed for Hyperspectral Image (HSI) denoising. However, the TV terms of these methods just use various l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> norms and penalize image gradient magnitudes, having a negative influence on the preprocessing of HSI denoising and further HSI classification task. In this paper, a novel l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> Total Variation (l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV) is first introduced and analyzed for the HSI noise removal framework to preserve more information for classification. We propose a novel Tensor low-rank constraint and l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> Total Variation (TLR-l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV) model in this paper. l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV directly controls the number of non-zero gradients and focuses on recovering the sharp image edges. The spectral-spatial information among all bands is exploited uniformly for removing mixed noise, which facilitates the subsequent classification after denoising. Including the Weighted Sum of Weighted Nuclear Norm (WSWNN) and the Weighted Sum of Weighted Tensor Nuclear Norm (WSWTNN), we propose two TLR-l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV-based algorithms, namely WSWNN-l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV and WSWTNN-l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV. The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and the Augmented Lagrange Multiplier (ALM) are employed to solve the l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV model and TLR-l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV model, respectively. In both simulated and real data, the proposed models achieve superior performances in mixed noise removal of HSI. Especially, HSI classification accuracy is improved more effectively after denoising by the proposed TLR-l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> TV method.

Following the traditional total variational denoising model in removing medical image noise with blurred image texture details, among other problems, an adaptive medical image fractional-order total variational denoising model with an improved sparrow search algorithm is proposed in this study. This algorithm combines the characteristics of fractional-order differential operators and total variational models. The model preserves the weak texture region of the image improvement based on the unique amplitude-frequency characteristics of the fractional-order differential operator. The order of the fractional-order differential operator is adaptively determined by the improved sparrow search algorithm using both the sine search strategy and the diversity variation processing strategy, which can greatly improve the denoising ability of the fractional-order differential operator. The experimental results reveal that the model not only achieves the adaptivity of fractional-order total variable differential order, but also can effectively remove noise, preserve the texture structure of the image to the maximum extent, and improve the peak signal-to-noise ratio of the image; it also displays favorable prospects for applications in medical image denoising.

New discretization of total variation functional for image processing tasks

Although the traditional TV (Total Variation) model owns excellent image denoising ability, there are staircase effect problems for TV model. In this article, two detection operators for staircase effect problem are proposed. The staircase effect problem can be solved effectively by introducing two operators into traditional TV model. On the basis, it proposes an adaptive total variation model for image denoising. When dealing with image edge, it can still use the traditional TV model. Its purpose is to maintain the advantages in edge protection for TV model. When it is in the smooth area of image, linear diffusion is used to avoid the staircase effect.

The removal of speckle noise in ultrasound images has been the focus of a number of researches. Meanwhile, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) has been proved effective for various computer vision tasks, including image classification, segmentation and denoising. In this paper, we apply deep convolutional neural network to remove speckle noise in ultrasound images. Besides, a new hybrid loss function is specially designed for speckle noise removal, which can result in faster and more stable convergence during training. Experiments on synthetic and real Ultrasound images show that the proposed model outperforms other speckle reduction methods.

In medical applications, computed tomography (CT) is widely used to evaluate various sample characteristics. However, image quality of CT reconstruction can be degraded due to artifacts. To propose and test a truncated total variation (truncation TV) model to solve the problem of large penalties for the total variation (TV) model. In this study, a truncated TV image denoising model in the fractional B-spline wavelet domain is developed to obtain the best solution. The method is validated by the analysis of CT reconstructed images of actual biological Pigeons samples. For this purpose, several indices including the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM) and mean square error (MSE) are used to evaluate the quality of images. Comparing to the conventional truncated TV model that yields 22.55, 0.688 and 361.17 in PSNR, SSIM and MSE, respectively, using the proposed fractional B-spline-truncated TV model, the computed values of these evaluation indices change to 24.24, 0.898 and 244.98, respectively, indicating substantial reduction of image noise with higher PSNR and SSIM, and lower MSE. Study results demonstrate that compared with many classic image denoising methods, the new denoising algorithm proposed in this study can more effectively suppresses the reconstructed CT image artifacts while maintaining the detailed image structure.

Imaging through turbid medium has many potential applications such as looking through clouds, seeing into seawater and observing through biological tissues. The transmission matrix (TM) method is one of the main imaging technologies that has potential in imaging of large targets. With aid of pre-measured TM, several optimization models are proposed to recover targets from speckle patterns, including &ell;₂ norm optimization model, sparse representation (SR) framework and total variation (TV) model. However, the solution of &ell;₂ norm optimization model contains large reconstruction noise, while the SR framework and TV model are two kinds of compressive sensing strategies, which require that the targets are sparse. In this paper, in order to image non-sparse targets and suppress the reconstruction noise, we apply the maximum entropy method (MEM) model to recover the target images from speckle patterns. Simulation results show that, for non-sparse target, the MEM model has better reconstruction performance under different noise levels compared with the TV model. For example, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and correlation coefficient (CC) of images reconstructed by MEM model at SNR=15 dB are comparable with those by TV model at SNR=35 dB.