Evaluation of various speckle reduction filters on medical ultrasound images

At present, ultrasound is one of the essential tools for noninvasive medical diagnosis. However, speckle noise is inherent in medical ultrasound images and it is the cause for decreased resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio. Low image quality is an obstacle for effective feature extraction, recognition, analysis, and edge detection; it also affects image interpretation by doctor and the accuracy of computer-assisted diagnostic techniques. Thus, speckle reduction is significant and critical step in pre-processing of ultrasound images. Many speckle reduction techniques have been studied by researchers, but to date there is no comprehensive method that takes all the constraints into consideration. In this paper we discuss seven filters, namely Lee, Frost, Median, Speckle Reduction Anisotropic Diffusion (SRAD), Perona-Malik´s Anisotropic Diffusion (PMAD) filter, Speckle Reduction Bilateral Filter (SRBF) and Speckle Reduction filter based on soft thresholding in the Wavelet transform. A comparative study of these filters has been made in terms of preserving the features and edges as well as effectiveness of de-noising.We computed five established evaluation metrics in order to determine which despeckling algorithm is most effective and optimal for real-time implementation. In addition, the experimental results have been demonstrated by filtered images and statistical data table.