Despeckling of Ultrasound Images in Contourlet Domain

Abstract:

Ultrasound images are the important foundation for disease diagnostics. Unfortunately, speckle noise is an inherent property of ultrasound images. So speckle reduction is an important pre-processing step in the ultrasound image feature extraction and analysis. This paper proposes a novel noise reduction algorithm for ultrasound images, which is based on edge detection of the images using the directional information of contourlet transform. The relative variance of the contourlet coefficients is used as a measure of edge detection. The adaptive threshold can be calculated using the probability density function of relative variance. It is shown that the proposed method outperforms several existing techniques in terms of the universal index, edge preservation and visual quality, and in addition, is able to maintain the significant details of ultrasound images.

• Periodical: Advanced Materials Research (Volume 647)
• Pages: 283-287
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.647.283
• Online since: January 2013
• Authors: Yu Shu Liu, Ming Yan Jiang
• Keywords: Contourlet, Edge Enhancement, Speckle Reduction

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