A novel approach to speckle reduction in ultrasound imaging.

Speckle noise is inherent in ultrasound images, and it generally tends to reduce the resolution and contrast, thereby degrading the diagnostic accuracy of this modality. Speckle reduction is very important and critical for ultrasound imaging. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for speckle reduction using 2-D homogeneity and directional average filters. We have conducted experiments on numerous artificial images, clinic breast ultrasound images and vascular images. The experimental results are compared with that of other methods and the performance is evaluated using several merits, and they demonstrate that the proposed approach can reduce the speckle noise effectively without blurring the edges and damaging the textual information. It will be very useful for computer-aided diagnosis systems using ultrasound images.