Ultrasound image despeckling using low rank matrix approximation approach

Abstract The nuclear norm minimization has attracted a great deal of research interest in contemporary years. This paper proposes a low-rank approximation based approach for despeckling of ultrasound images using weighted nuclear norm minimization (WNNM). Two methods are proposed to recover the despeckled image from the speckled data. In the first approach, the homomorphic technique is applied to the speckled ultrasound image followed by low-rank minimisation technique to despeckle the ultrasound image. In the second method, in order to enhance the despeckling capacity, a pre-processing stage is incorporated taking into consideration of the statistical properties of an ultrasound video data. Experimental results on simulated and real ultrasound data prove that the proposed methods outperform the state-of-art works.