Variable Bandwidth Mean Shift for smoothing ultrasonic images

As the variance of the statistics of ultrasonic data in a homogeneous tissue may be rather large and the statistics of different tissues may be very similar, a new filtering approach is proposed to enhance the contrast in ultrasonic images. It is based on the Variable Bandwidth Mean Shift algorithm adapted to the specificities of ultrasonic data. A fully automatic adaptive bandwidth selection in both range and spatial domains is described. Our method was compared to a Variable Bandwidth Mean Shift algorithm based on an adaptive range scale selection and a fixed spatial scale parameter. The results show the superiority of our method.