Despeckle Filters for Medical Ultrasound Images

This chapter will introduce several kinds of denosing methods, and speckle reduction techniques and their applications in the breast ultrasound imaging are discussed. Five categories of despeckle filters are presented. This chapter focuses on the comparison of despeckle filters for the breast ultrasound images. Despeckle filters which are classified into five categories (local adaptive filter, anisotropic diffusion filter, multi-scale filter, nonlocal means filter, and hybrid filter) are described. The comparative experiments of eleven despeckle filters for the two types of simulated images and clinical ultrasound breast images are presented. To objectively and systematically compare the performance of eleven despeckle filters, several comparison methods are used, such as the full-reference image quality metrics, the non-reference/blind image quality metrics, observing the removed noise images, as well as the visual evaluation of experts.