A Novel Weighted Diffusion Filtering Approach for Speckle Suppression in Ultrasound Images

Abstract

Ultrasound images mainly suffer from speckle noise which makes it difficult to differentiate between small details and noise. Conventional anisotropic diffusion approaches tend to provide edge sensitive diffusion for speckle suppression. This paper proposes a novel approach for removal of speckle along with due smoothening of irregularities present in the ultrasound images by modifying the diffusion coefficient in anisotropic diffusion approach. The present work proposes a diffusion coefficient which is a function of difference of instantaneous coefficient (of variation) and the coefficient of variation for homogeneous region. The finally reconstructed image is obtained by weighted addition of the response of proposed anisotropic diffusion filter and the Laplacian filtered image. Simulation results show that performance of the proposed approach is significantly improved in comparison to recently developed anisotropic diffusion filters for speckle suppression. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.