Despeckling of medical ultrasound images using multiscale weighting nonlinear diffusion

A new despeckling algorithm for medical ultrasound images using multiscale weighting nonlinear diffusion is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the input image is decomposed by redundant Laplace transformation. Then, in the multiscale images, nonlinear diffusion is used. For nonlinear diffusion in each sub-image, an image gradient index is automatically determined by weighting the image gradient indexes of all the sub-images. To test the validity of the proposed algorithm, the typical methods of directly nonlinear diffusion and adaptive wavelet filter were used for comparison. The simulation and real ultrasound image results indicate that our approach can not only decrease speckle noise significantly but also preserve image details.