Speckle reduction in echocardiographic images

Speckle noise is the major difficulty that arises in echocardiographic image processing. Adaptive smoothing techniques for speckle reduction in Two-dimensional echocardiographic images are presented in this paper. Tn the first stage, we have applied the Lee, Kuan, and Frost filters, based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) design approach. Additionally, anisotropic diffusion method has been used to denoise echocardiographic images. It´s a new method derived from convolution with a Gaussian, which allows reducing the noise in the image without blurring the frontiers between different regions. Criteria for quantifying the performance of the studied filters have been defmed and calculated. We cite the ratio of mean grey level, the ratio of speckle index, and the parameter of transition. Quantitative measurements demonstrate the effectiveness of the anisotropic diffusion filter, for both speckle reduction and edge preservation.