A selective denoising method to remove speckle noise

Abstract

Speckle noise strongly affects the images acquired by ultrasound scans and reduces the efficiency of computational methods to extract and understand the features presented in the images. Trying to overcome this problem, a selective denoising method is proposed based on average filtering and on the radiation intensity associated to the input image pixels. Experimental tests were done using a set of simulated ultrasound images and a real ultrasound image sequence, and their statistical analysis confirmed that the proposed method has good ability to reduce speckle noise in ultrasound images.