A stochastic approach to ultrasound despeckling

A novel stochastically driven filtering method to despeckle B mode ultrasound images is presented. This method is motivated by viewing the pixel values as a stochastic process and removing outliers, where outliers are defined by local extrema. These outliers are removed by local averaging. This produces another image with new outliers (local extrema) and the process is iteratively repeated. With each iteration homogeneous regions become smoother while edges that defined these regions remain preserved. To evaluate the performance of our proposed method in satisfying these two opposing goals we develop a modified Fisher discriminant contrast metric. Larger values of this metric indicate better performance in reducing each intraregion or intraclass variance and increasing the difference of interregion or interclass means