Title :
Ultrasound despeckling for active contour segmentation
Author :
Ma, Yiming ; Tay, Peter C.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng. Technol., Western Carolina Univ., Cullowhee, NC, USA
Abstract :
Automatic or semi-automatic gradient based segmentation of ultrasound images is problematic because the inherent nature of ultrasound imaging produces speckle. The main concern of this paper is to remove speckle cause gradients that cannot be attributed to anatomic features. Application of despeckling algorithms attempt to remove or reduce the speckle noise and thus the pixelwise gradients caused by speckle. Yet, the despeckling algorithm should preserve edges and gradients that are due to anatomic features such as the boundaries of organs, differing tissues, etc. This paper proposes the use of the noise enhanced squeeze box filter to despeckle cardiac ultrasound images so that an application of well-know gradient based active contour methods can be used for segmentation.
Keywords :
filtering theory; gradient methods; image denoising; image segmentation; medical image processing; active contour segmentation; cardiac ultrasound image despeckling; gradient based active contour method; noise enhanced squeeze box filter; semiautomatic gradient based segmentation; ultrasound despeckling algorithm; ultrasound imaging; Active contours; Active noise reduction; Filtering; Filters; Image edge detection; Image segmentation; Iterative algorithms; Noise robustness; Speckle; Ultrasonic imaging; Ultrasound imaging; cardiac segmentation; despeckling;
Conference_Titel :
Image Processing (ICIP), 2009 16th IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Cairo
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-5653-6
Electronic_ISBN :
1522-4880
DOI :
10.1109/ICIP.2009.5413890