Ultrasound image denoising using a combination of bilateral filtering and stationary wavelet transform

Medical image degradation has a significant impact on image quality, and thus affects human interpretation and the accuracy of computer-assisted diagnostic techniques. Unfortunately, Ultrasound images are mainly degraded by an intrinsic noise called speckle. Therefore, despekle filtering is a critical preprocessing step in medical ultrasound images. In this paper we propose a new image denoising technique based on the combination of bilateral filter and stationary wavelet transform. The main contribution of this paper is in the use of a new neighborhood relationship to develop a new multiscale bilateral filter. Experimental results validated the effectiveness and the accuracy of the proposed filter in speckle noise reduction and edge preservation for medical ultrasound images.