A novel speckle reduction and contrast enhancement method based on fuzzy anisotropic diffusion

Two major problems of ultrasound imaging are low-contrast and speckle noise. Traditionally, before speckle reduction, an enhancement algorithm is employed to improve the quality of the image. However, the noise is enhanced as well. To overcome this drawback, we introduce a novel fuzzy anisotropic diffusion approach for speckle reduction and contrast enhancement. Maximum fuzzy entropy principle is used to map the image from space domain to fuzzy domain. Then, fractional-order partial differential equation is used to remove noise and to preserve edges. Finally, the subpixel operator is utilized as a tuning parameter to achieve the optimal result. We test the proposed method on synthetic and real breast ultrasound (BUS) images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can preserve the edges and enhance the structural details of the BUS images well while removing speckle noise.