Wavelet and fast bilateral filter based de-speckling method for medical ultrasound images

Abstract Speckle noise is an undesirable part of the ultrasound imaging process, since it can degrade the quality of ultrasound images and restrict the development of automatic diagnostic techniques for ultrasound images. Aiming at the problem of speckle noise, an improved de-speckling method for medical ultrasound images is proposed, which is based on the wavelet transformation and fast bilateral filter. According to the statistical properties of medical ultrasound image in the wavelet domain, an improved wavelet threshold function based on the universal wavelet threshold function is considered. The wavelet coefficients of noise-free signal and speckle noise are modeled as generalized Laplace distribution and Gaussian distribution, respectively. The Bayesian maximum a posteriori estimation is applied to obtain a new wavelet shrinkage algorithm. High-pass component speckle noise in the wavelet domain of ultrasound images is suppressed by the new shrinkage algorithm. Additionally, the coefficients of the low frequency signal in the wavelet domain are filtered by the fast bilateral filter, since the low-pass component of ultrasound images also contains some speckle noise. Compared with other de-speckling methods, experiments show that the proposed method has improved de-speckling performance for medical ultrasound images. It not only has better reduction performance than other methods but also can preserve image details such as the edge of lesions.