AN ALPHA-STABLE BASED BAYESIAN ALGORITHM FOR SPECKLE NOISE REMOVAL IN THE WAVELET DOMAIN

This paper introduces a novel speckle noise removal method for medical ultrasound images. First, the logarithmic transform of the original image is analyzed in the wavelet domain. We show that the subband decompositions of ultrasound images have signi£cant non - Gaussian statistics that are best described by families of heavy-tailed distributions such as the alpha-stable. Consequently, we design a Bayesian estimator that exploits these statistics. Using the alpha-stable model we develop a blind noise-removal processor that performs a non-linear operation on the data. Finally, we compare our proposed technique to current stateof-the-art speckle reduction methods and we quantify the achieved performance improvement.