Nonlocal total variation based speckle noise removal method for ultrasound image

Ultrasound images are widely used in diagnosis and therapy. However the existence of speckle will disgraces image quality and affects the tasks of individual interpretation and diagnosis. Nonlocal total variation (TV) denoising is one of the best denoising models and it is widely used to remove additive Gaussian noise. In this paper, we extend the application of nonlocal TV denoising model to remove speckle noise in ultrasound images. We present a model of the speckle noise in ultrasound images firstly. Then we propose an efficient algorithm to minimize the nonlocal TV energy based on the Split-Bregman method. At last we compare our nonlocal TV method with some well-known speckle noise filtering techniques and measure the denoising quality by different evaluating indicators. Experimental results show that the speckle noise can be efficiently removed by our method and the structure of the object can be well preserved, also our algorithm has the best performance among the algorithms of state-of-the-arts.