Real-Time Speckle Reduction of Ultrasound Images Based on Regularized Savitzky-Golay Filters

This paper describes a new filtering algorithm developed for real-time speckle reduction of ultrasound medical images. The new filter, referred to as the Regularized Savitzky-Golay filter, is the two-dimensional Savitzky-Golay filter, enhanced with a mechanism for adapting the degree of smoothing to match the strength of speckle. The results comparing the new filter algorithm with Adaptive Speckle Reduction and Adaptive Weighted Median filters on a synthetic test pattern and an ultrasound cyst image are reported.