Nonlocal Means-based Speckle Filtering for Ultrasound Images

Overview

Journal IEEE Trans Image Process

Date 2009 Jun 2

PMID 19482578

Citations 70

Authors

Pierrick Coupe

Pierre Hellier

Charles Kervrann

Christian Barillot

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

In image processing, restoration is expected to improve the qualitative inspection of the image and the performance of quantitative image analysis techniques. In this paper, an adaptation of the nonlocal (NL)-means filter is proposed for speckle reduction in ultrasound (US) images. Originally developed for additive white Gaussian noise, we propose to use a Bayesian framework to derive a NL-means filter adapted to a relevant ultrasound noise model. Quantitative results on synthetic data show the performances of the proposed method compared to well-established and state-of-the-art methods. Results on real images demonstrate that the proposed method is able to preserve accurately edges and structural details of the image.

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