Pipelined DSP implementation of nonlinear anisotropic diffusion for speckle reduction of USG images

In this paper a real time approach to reduce speckle noise and enhance structures in speckle corrupted ultrasound image is proposed. It utilizes nonlinear anisotropic diffusion for speckle removal and edge enhancement. Unlike the conventional anisotropic diffusion performed in four different directions, here diffusion is performed in eight different directions. The algorithm has been proficiently implemented using a low cost Texas Instruments (TI) Digital Signal Processor (DSP) of series TMS320C64x+. The approach speeds up the computation by utilizing the ability of Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processor to perform multiple operations in parallel. In addition, a new feature to select a Speckle Reduction Imaging (SRI) mode is introduced which facilitates different degree of smoothing depending on the requirement. The experimental results show that with an speckled input image of size 640 × 480 the algorithm is capable of supporting 105 frames per second (fps). This method also promises better image quality than window based filtering techniques.