Speckle spot detection in ultrasound images: Application to speckle reduction and speckle tracking

This paper investigates the speckle spot detection task in ultrasound images. Speckle spots are described by structural criteria: dimensions, shape, and topology. We propose to represent the image using a morphological inclusion tree, from which speckle spots are detected using their structural appearance. This makes the method independent of contrast, and hence robusts to intensity correction. The detection was applied to speckle reduction and speckle tracking, and experiments showed that this approach performs well compared to state-of-the-art methods.