Real-time speckle reduction and coherence enhancement of ultrasound images based on mixture of anisotropic Savitzky-Golay filters

This paper describes a new filtering algorithm developed for real-time speckle reduction and coherence enhancement of ultrasound images. The new filter, referred to as the Mixture of Anisotropic Savitzky-Golay filters, is a collection of two-dimensional weighted Savitzky-Golay filters, each enhanced with a mechanism for adjusting both the degree and direction of the smoothing so that they both match the anisotropic properties of each local regions in the image. The results comparing the new filter algorithm with Adaptive Speckle Reduction and Adaptive Weighted Median filters on a synthetic test pattern and a ultrasound cyst image are also reported