Ultrasound imaging is widely used in medical diagnosis, because of its non invasive nature, low cost, capability of forming real time imaging and continued improvement in image quality. The main drawback during diagnosis is the distortion of visual signals. These distortions are termed as speckle noise, which makes the image unclear and make diagnostic more difficult. Many denoising techniques are proposed for effective suppression of speckle noise. In this paper three adaptive filters are used and we have compared and evaluated the performance of famous filters for speckle noise reduction in fetal ultrasound image.

ultrasound images, speckle, PSNR, MSE, MAE

[1] S. Gupta, L. Kaur, R. C. Chauhan, and S. C. Saxena, “A Versatile Technique for Visual Enhancement of Medical Ultrasound Images,” IEEE Transactions on Digital Signal Processing, 17, pp. 542–546, 2007.
[2] A. Pizurica, W. Philips, “ A Versatile Wavelet Domain Noise Filtration Technique for Medical Imaging,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 22(3), pp. 323–331, 2003.
[3] A. Buades, B. Coll and J. M. Morel, “A Review of Image Denoising Algorithms with a New One,” IEEE Transactions on Image Denoising Algorithms, 4(2), pp. 490–530, 2005.
[4] S. Karabchevsky, D. Kahana, Ortal Ben-Harush, and H. Guterman,” FPGA-Based Adaptive Speckle Suppression Filter for Underwater Imaging Sonar,” IEEE Journal Of Oceanic Engg., 36(4), 2011.
[5] Antonio Fernandez-Caballero and Juan L. Mateo, “Methodological Approach to Reducing Speckle Noise in Ultrasound images,”International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics, IEEE Computer Society, DOI 10.1109/BMEI.2008.328, 2008.
[6] J. C. Dainty, “Detection of Images Immersed in Speckle Noise,” Optica Acta, Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 327-339, 1971.
[7] A. K. Jain,”Fundamental of Digital Image Processing,” Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989.
[8] T. Joel and R. Sivakumar, “Despeckling of Ultrasound Medical Images: A Survey,” Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 1, No. 3, Sept. 2013.
[9] C. I. Christodouloul, C. Loizou, C.S. Pattichis, M. Pantziarisl, E. Kyriakoul, M. S. Pattichis, C. N. Schizas, A. Nicolaides, De-speckle Filtering in Ultrasound Imaging of the Carotid Artery,” Proceedings of the Second Joint EMBSiBMES Conference Houston, TX, USA, Oct. 23-26, 2002 IEEE.
[10] O. Lopera, R. Heremans, A. Pizurica, and Y. Dupont, “Filtering Speckle Noise in SAS Images to Improve Detection and Identification of Seafloor Targets,” International Waterside Security Conference, 2010.
[11] J. Lee, “Digital Image Enhancement and Noise Filtering by Use of Local Statistics,” IEEE Trans. On Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. Pami-2, No 2, March 1980.
[12] S. K. Narayanan and R. S. D. Wahidabanu, “ A View on Despeckling in Ultrasound Imaging,” International Journal of Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, 2(3), 2009.
[13] R. Czerwinski, D. L. Jones, and W. D. O’Brien, “Detection of Lines and Boundaries Speckle Images Application to Medical Ultrasound,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 18(2), 1999.
[14] K. Bala Prakash, R. Venu Babu, B. Venu Gopal, “Image Independent Filter for Removal of Speckle Noise,” International Journal of Computer Science Issues, 8(3), 2011.
[15] C. Li, “Two Adaptive Filters for Speckle Reduction in SAR imagery by Using the Variance Ratio,” International General of Remote Sensing, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 641-653, 1988.