Speckle ultrasound image filtering: Performance analysis and comparison

This paper compiles and compares well-known techniques mostly used in the smoothing or suppression of speckle noise in ultrasound images. A comparison of the methods studied is done based on an experiment, using quality metrics, texture analysisand interpretation of row profiles to evaluate their performance and show the benefits each one can contribute to denoising and feature preservation. To test the methods, a noise-free image of a kidney is used and then the Field II program simulates a B-mode ultrasound image. This way, the smoothing techniques can be compared using numeric metrics, taking the noise-free image as a reference. In this study, a total of seventeen different speckle reduction algorithms have been documented based on spatial filtering, diffusion filtering and wavelet filtering, with fifteen qualitative metrics estimation. We use the tendencies observed in our study in real images. This work was carried out in collaboration with S. Teotonio—Viseu (Portugal) Hospital. A new evaluation metric is proposed to evaluate the despeckling results.