Speckle reduction by phase-based weighted least squares

Although ultrasonography has been widely used in clinical applications, the doctor suffers great difficulties in diagnosis due to the artifacts of ultrasound images, especially the speckle noise. This paper proposes a novel framework for speckle reduction by using a phase-based weighted least squares optimization. The proposed approach can effectively smooth out speckle noise while preserving the features in the image, e.g., edges with different contrasts. To this end, we first employ a local phase-based measure, which is theoretically intensity-invariant, to extract the edge map from the input image. The edge map is then incorporated into the weighted least squares framework to supervise the optimization during despeckling, so that low contrast edges can be retained while the noise has been greatly removed. Experimental results in synthetic and clinical ultrasound images demonstrate that our approach performs better than state-of-the-art methods.