Speckle suppression by adaptive nonlinear filtering

Using a good statistical model of speckle formation is important for designing an adaptive filter for speckle reduction in ultrasound B-scan images. Most clinical ultrasound imaging systems use nonlinear logarithmic functions to reduce the dynamic range of the input echo signal and emphasize objects with weak back scatter. The statistics of log-compressed images for the Nakagami distribution are used for designing an adaptive nonlinear filter for the purpose of speckle reduction. We processed two original ultrasound images of kidney and liver to demonstrate the efficiency of the designed filter.