Noise Reduction in Ultrasound Images Based on the Concept of Local Neighborhood Exploration

Abstract

In this paper a novel approach to the problem of speckle noise suppression in ultrasound images is presented. The described method is a modification of the bilateral denoising scheme and is based on the concept of local neighborhood exploration. The proposed filtering design, like the bilateral filter, takes into account the similarity of pixels intensities together with their spatial distance, and the filter output is calculated as a weighted average of the pixels belonging to the filtering window. The weights assigned to the pixels are determined by minimum connection costs of digital paths joining the central pixel of the filtering window and its neighbors. The comparison with existing denoising schemes shows that the new technique yields significantly better results in case of ultrasound images contaminated by multiplicative noise. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.