Modified rayleigh maximum likelihood despeckling filter using fuzzy rules

Speckle noise is the most prevalent noise in clinical ultrasound images. It visibly looks like light and dark spots and murkily deduces the pixel intensity. Gazing at fetal ultrasound images, the impact of edge and local fine details are more palpable to carry out prenatal diagnosis of congenital heart disease. A robust despeckling filter has to be contrived to proficiently suppress speckle noise and simultaneously preserve the features. Basically filters fail to distinguish local variation of pixel intensity of noise and features due to the usage of statistical tools. The proposed Modified Rayleigh maximum likelihood filter using Fuzzy rules exploits the fuzzy connectivity of the pixel intensity as its tuning parameter to distinguish edge and background region in image. The performance of the proposed filter is compared with various existing filters like Median, Kuwahura, Frost and Rayleigh maximum likelihood filter to prove its proficiency in terms several performance indices and image profile. Comparatively the proposed filter surpass the conventional filters.