A 3-D bilateral filter for speckle reduction in 3-D ultrasound images for cattle follicle segmentation

In this paper, we investigate the reduction of speckles in 3-D ultrasound images using a 3-D bilateral filter for cattle follicle segmentation and volume estimation. Adaptive 3-D bilateral filter is developed to reduce the speckles in the ultrasound images effectively. We compared the proposed 3-D bilateral filter with the conventional 3-D bilateral filter and 3-D Gaussian filter using both 3-D synthetic speckled images and real ultrasound images. Quantitative analysis verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.