Speckle supression for medical ultrasound images based on modelling speckle with Rayleigh distribution in contourlet domain

In this paper, we proposed a new speckle suppression method for medical ultrasound images based on contourlet transform. Modeling the speckle with Rayleigh distribution in logarithmically transformed ultrasound images, a maximum a posterior (MAP) estimator is applied for speckle reduction via manipulating the coefficients in contourlet domain. Experimental results show that while effectively suppress the speckle, the proposed method has a better performance on preserving fine feature details in comparison with several traditional medical ultrasound denoising techniques.