Quantum-inspired hybrid medical ultrasound images despeckling method

A novel medical ultrasound despeckling method combining quantum-inspired bilateral filtering and wavelet thresholding is proposed. An adaptive bilateral filter under the framework of quantum signal processing is exploited in this method and used as a pre-processing step. Then wavelet thresholding, on the assumption that the signal and noise coefficients in the wavelet domain are subject to generalised Laplace distribution and Gaussian distribution, respectively, is applied to the pre-filtered image. Experiments show that the proposed method can obtain a better speckle noise reduction performance while retaining high-contrast features such as edges.