A Novel Approach to Speckle Reduction to Ultrasound Image

Speckle noise is inherent in ultrasound images, and it generally tends to reduce the resolution and contrast, thereby,to degrade the diagnostic accuracy of this modality. Speckle reduction is very important and critical for ultrasound imaging. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for speckle reduction using twodimensional (2D) homogeneity and directional average filters. We have conducted experiments on numerous artificial images, clinic breast ultrasound images and vascular images. The experimental results are compared with that of other methods and the performance is evaluated using several metrics, and they demonstrate that the proposed approach can reduce the speckle noise effectively without blurring the edges and damaging the textual information. It will be useful for computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems using ultrasound images.