Comparison of despeckle filters for ultrasound images

A comparative study of despeckle filters for ultrasound images have been presented in this paper. We know that the ultrasound images are corrupted by speckle noise, which has limited the growth of automatic diagnosis for ultrasound images. This paper compiles twelve despeckling filters for speckle noise reduction. A comparative study has been done in terms of preserving the texture features and edges. Six stabilized evaluation metrics, namely, signal to noise ratio (SNR), root mean square error (RMSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM) index, beta metric (β) and figure of merit (FoM) are calculated to investigate the performance of the despeckle filters.