An Ultrasound Image Despeckling Method Based on Weighted Adaptive Bilateral Filter

Abstract

Images are widely used in engineering. Unfortunately, ultrasound images are mainly degraded by an intrinsic noise called speckle. Therefore, de-speckling is a critical preprocessing step. Therefore, a robust despeckling method and accurate evaluation of images are suggested. We suggest three phases and a three-step denoising filter. In the first phase, the coefficients of variation are computed from the noisy image. The second phase is a three-step denoising filter. The first step is denoising of extreme levels of homogeneous regions, based on fuzzy homogeneous regions. The second step is a proposed adaptive bilateral filter (ABF). The ABF helps for better denoising based on the three regions which are edge, detail and homogeneous regions. The next step, a weight, is applied to the ABF. This step is for isolated noise denoising. Next, in the third phase, the output image is evaluated by the fuzzy logic approach. The proposed method is compared with other filters in the literature. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed method has better performance than the other filters. That proposed denoising algorithm is able to preserve image details and edges when compared with other denoising methods.