Adaptive Persistence Utilizing Motion Compensation for Ultrasound Images

Persistence, also called temporal averaging, takes the weighted average between successive image frames to reduce the ultrasound speckle noise. Conventional methods apply persistence coefficients as a function of two image pixels at the same location of two successive frames that always make structure blurring during tissue movement. In this paper we apply the motion analysis technique in a way of compensating the internal tissue motions to have accurate image registration such that the persistence works at the right spatial positions without blurring the tissue structure. To meet the real-time requirement of ultrasound imaging, we use the sum-absolute-difference based block matching method for local motion estimation, followed by motion dependent persistence averaging. In vivo tests show that our method can increase signalto- noise ratio of imaging and also present better edge differentiation in structure regions.