B-mode ultrasonic images quality enhancement using an intelligent 5∗5 pixels window averaging

Image processing has been widely utilized in different areas including artificial intelligent, medical image processing, robotics and etc. In this paper, a novel approach to reduce the speckle noise from ultrasound images is proposed. Ultrasound imaging devices are the most commonly used imaging systems in medical field. Although, the main negative side of these imaging techniques is speckle noise, which is an inherent nature of ultrasound images. Despeckling ultrasound images has captured attention of scientists for many decades. In this present study, a non-uniform averaging filter is suggested. Intelligent window averaging (IWA) filter as the proposed method considers a 5 × 5 window size and defines a specific range. It computes the average value of pixels within the kernel existing in this range. Then, it switches the average value with the centered cell. Furthermore, the new algorithm is validated through real B-mode ultrasonic images. Eventually, the proposed approach is compared with other state-of-the-art despeckling methods to demonstrate its better performance.