A study of ultrasound images enhancement using adaptive speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion

We introduce the adaptive speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion(SRAD) that uses wavelet for enhancement of medical ultrasound images. This method first modifies coarse-to-fine classification to decide the homogeneous region that operated as diffusion threshold in SRAD works. Then, SRAD are played on each scale of decomposed wavelet domain with determined homogeneous regions as called ldquospeckle scale functionrdquo. From this process, homogenous region can considered without manual selection or preliminary exponential decay function. As a result, conventional SRAD will modify as adaptive one. Moreover, variety pattern of speckle is reduced by the proposed modified SRAD on wavelet decomposing. The proposed method can improve the image quality for ultrasound images enhancement. Finally, we validate this method to compare with conventional filters group using artificial speckle image and real ultrasound images. The experimental results show that the proposed method performed effectively both terms of speckle reduction and edge preservation.