Denosing 3D Ultrasound Images by Non-local Means Accelerated by GPU

In Ultrasound imaging, speckle noise is the most serious problem which affects the performance of images. Non-local mean filter is a nice method to remove the speckle noise, but the algorithm´ computational complexity makes it´s a highly time-consuming method. In many applications like image-guided surgical intervention, real-time de-noising is required. This paper implements a NLM method accelerated by GPU for real-time denoising of 3D ultrasound images. The experimental results show the proposed accelerated de-noising method is efficient in terms of denoising quality and real-time.