A novel local spline smoothing-based approach for medical ultrasound images enhancement

In this work, a novel local spline smoothing-based approach is proposed in order to despeckling medical ultrasound images. For better comparison, firstly nine conventional statistical spatial filters were applied on the ultrasound images and the results evaluated by quantitative indices of contrast to noise ratio (CNR) and speckle signal to noise ratio (SSNR). Secondly, one-dimensional cubic spline smoothing (1DCSS) function was applied on the whole speckled image as the first proposed approach. Finally, as the second proposed approach, 1DCSS was applied locally on the sliding windows of the ultrasound image then conventional statistical spatial filters were applied. The results indicate that the proposed approaches outperform the existing conventional ones.