Aggressive region growing for speckle reduction in ultrasound images
Pattern Recognition Letters - Speciqal issue: Ultrasonic image processing and analysis
A diffusion stick method for speckle suppression in ultrasonic images
Pattern Recognition Letters
Image denoising with complex ridgelets
Pattern Recognition
Image quality based comparative evaluation of wavelet filters in ultrasound speckle reduction
Digital Signal Processing
Image denoising with neighbour dependency and customized wavelet and threshold
Pattern Recognition
De-noising by soft-thresholding
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Derivation of centralized and distributed filters using covariance information
Computational Statistics & Data Analysis
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
VLSI-DSP based real time solution of DSC-SRI for an ultrasound system
Microprocessors & Microsystems
Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
| Hi-index | 12.05 |
This article investigates and compiles some of the techniques mostly used in the smoothing or suppression of speckle noise in ultrasound images. With this information, a comparison of all the methods studied is done based on an experiment, using quality metrics to test their performance and show the benefits each one can contribute. To test the methods, a synthetic, noise-free image of a kidney is created and later simulations using Field II program to corrupt it are performed. This way, the smoothing techniques can be compared using numeric metrics, taking the noise-free image as a reference. Since real ultrasound images are already noise corrupted images and real noise-free images do not exist, conventional metrics cannot be used to indicate the quality obtained with filtering. Nevertheless, we propose the use of the tendencies observed in our study in real images.