Squeeze box filter for contrast enhancement in ultrasound despeckling

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging is a widely used and safe medical diagnostic technique, due to its noninvasive nature, low cost, real time imaging. However the usefulness of ultrasound imaging is degraded by the presence of signal depended noise known as speckle‥ The speckle pattern depends on the structure of the image tissue and various imaging parameters. There are two main purposes for speckle reduction in medical ultrasound imaging (1) to improve the human interpretation of ultrasound images (2) despeckling is the preprocessing step for many ultrasound image processing tasks such as segmentation and registration‥ The recent advancements in ultrasound devices necessitate the need of more robust despeckling techniques for enhancing ultrasound medical imaging in routine clinical practice. The method is developed to contrast enhance B-mode ultrasound images. Despeckle filter is very important in the enhancement of ultrasound imaging. This method is motivated by viewing the pixel values as a speckle and removing outliers and enhances the image contrast. Several speckle reduction techniques are applied to ultrasound images in order to reduce the speckle and improve the visual quality for better diagnoses. A comparison of the proposed despeckling filter is compared with other well knowndespeckling filter. The essence of this despeckling method is to remove highly dense impulse noise using Squeeze Box Filter. The despeckling performance based upon improvements to contrast enhancement, structural similarity, and segmentation.