A new restoration method and its application to speckle images

The visual interpretation of ultrasound brain images is a proven method to detect the white matter damage at an early stage. A problem, common to all medical ultrasound images, is the presence of speckle noise, which not only complicates the visual interpretation of images, but also quantitative measurements. This paper proposes a new filter that removes a significant amount of speckle noise from ultrasound images, while preserving details very well. The filter is based on a new cleaning technique that operates on the detail images of a wavelet decomposition. The paper illustrates that the proposed technique has some advantages over other popular techniques, i.e., the ones proposed by Lee (1980), Frost (1982), Malfait and Roose (1997), and Sattar et al. (1997)