Speckle Noise Removal Using Spatial and Transform Domain Filters in Ultrasound Images

Abstract

Noise in the Ultrasound (US) images creates difficulties in interpreting the actual information in the image. Various studies have been done in this direction to retain useful information from the images. Speckle noise is an important noise type present in ultrasound images in the area of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), active Radar, Optical coherence tomography (OCT) and medicine. The granular pattern of speckle noise is formed due to the simultaneous processing of backscattered signals from dispersed targets. This noise limits the quality and contrast of the obtained images resulting in poor understanding of the underlying facts. This work focuses on the various denoising techniques in spatial and transform domain for speckle noise removal in ultrasound images. The performance evaluation of these techniques was done with metrics like Speckle suppression index (SSI), Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and Structural similarity index measure (SSIM). From the experiments, it is evident that SRAD algorithm in spatial domain really out performed all other filters with better SSI, PSNR and SSIM values.