Ultrasound speckle noise reduction via an adaptive edge-controlled variational method

Medical ultrasound images are one of the most important and widely used diagnostic tools thanks to its noninvasive nature, high efficacy, low cost and real time display. However, a common phenomenon in imaging systems is the superimposing of a granular structure on the image contaminated with multiplicative speckle noise that distort and hinder the analysis of the diagnosis. In this paper a novel variational method is proposed to reduce speckle in ultrasound images, in which the location of the noisy pixels with high level noise are detected by a function that controls the velocity of the smoothness and adjusts the fidelity along with the smoothness terms of the functional. Several experiments and comparisons made with other methods are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method.