Speckle Suppressing Improved Oriented Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion (IOSRAD) Filter for Medical Ultrasound Images

Abstract

— Ultrasound imaging is the most commonly used imaging system in medical field. Main problem related to this imaging technique is introduction of speckle noise, thus making the image unclear. The success of ultrasonic examination depends on the image quality which is usually retarded due to speckle noise. There have been several techniques for effective suppression of speckle noise present in ultrasound images. The filtering techniques considered include anisotropic diffusion, wavelet de-noising, and local statistics. Comparison of the filters is based on their application of objective quality metrics, which quantifies the preservation of image edges, overall image distortion, and improvement in image contrast. The computational analysis quantifies the number of operations required for each speckle reduction method. A speed-accuracy analysis of various methods for anisotropic diffusion is included. It is concluded that the optimal method is the OSRAD (Oriented Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion) filter. The proposed approach technique deals with an improved OSRAD filter which gives an efficient result other than the previous filters by analysing the quality metrics.