Two-dimensional noise-robust blind deconvolution of ultrasound images

This paper presents a new method for 2-D blind homomorphic deconvolution of medical B-scan ultrasound images. The method is based on noise-robust 2-D phase unwrapping and a noise-robust procedure to estimate the pulse in the complex cepstrum domain. Ordinary Wiener filtering is used in the subsequent deconvolution. The resulting images became much sharper with better defined tissue structures compared with the ordinary images. The deconvolved images had a resolution gain of the order of 3 to 7, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) doubled for many of the images used in our experiments. The method gave stable results with respect to noise and gray levels through several image sequences.