Speckle suppression of ultrasonic images using non-local means and McIlhagga-based anisotropic diffusion

Speckle noise contaminates medical ultrasound images and the suppression of speckle noise is valuable for image interpretation. This paper presents a new method for speckle suppression by integrating the non-local means (NLM) with the McIlhagga-based anisotropic diffusion (MAD). The MAD is first used to get a diffused image from the initial noisy image, and then the NLM is conducted to get a final denoised image by processing both the initial image and the diffused image. Experimental results on both simulated and real ultrasound images validate the feasibility of the method and demonstrate its superiority to seven state-of-the-art methods in terms of noise reduction and detail preservation.